Built Environments of Epipalaeolithic Southwest Asia: A Life History of Place

Summary

This is an abstract from the "More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

A place is structured and given meaning through human experiences at both individual and group levels. Places are created through repeated human action and made tangible in the landscape by material culture. These places become part of a built environment, marked by daily routines or habitus. At the 20,000-year-old aggregation site of Kharaneh IV in Jordan, the remains of several recently excavated hut structures provides insight into the creation and maintenance of place. Exploration of the life histories of these structures, including their construction, maintenance, and the organization and differential use of space is provided by a microstratigraphic analyses of their deposits and associated material culture. In-depth study of the traces of human activities—as activity areas, taskscapes, life histories, object and sediment (or even place) biographies—left behind by daily practices yield high-resolution data on these structures as economically, socially and symbolically-charged spaces and provide insight into how people organized their world, creating a life history of place, or ‘storied landscape’. At Kharaneh IV the life histories of hut structures, as told by pairing geoarchaeological (micromorphological) and artifact datasets, provide a glimpse into the lives woven into and around these places as integral to the construction of hunter-gatherer communities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• More Than Shelter from the Storm: Hunter-Gatherer Houses and the Built Environment   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25748