Whole Assemblage Behavioral Indicators: Examining Pattern in the Late Pleistocene of the Wadi al-Hasa, Jordan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the 1980s, surveys in Jordan’s Wadi al-Hasa document dozens of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherer sites, some of them tested or partly excavated. To track landscape-scale forager mobility and settlement patterns over time, we examine 26 levels from 13 sites dated to the Middle, Upper and Epipaleolithic using aspects of Barton’s WABI research protocol, a collection of methods designed to extract pattern from archaeological palimpsests. Because forager ethnographies document flexible adaptive strategies that do not readily map onto the discrete site types employed by archaeologists, we evaluate the utility of the latter so far as behavioral inferences are concerned. We show that discrete bimodal contrasts like ‘curated’ and ‘expedient’ and their archaeological correlates fail to capture a much more complex reality. Only by using WABI methods in conjunction with these analytical correlates can we attain a picture of forager mobility and land use that approximates that known from ethnography.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36755.0