Preliminary analysis of the Late Natufian ground stone from Shubayqa 1, Jordan

Shubayqa 1 is a newly identified early and late Natufian site in the harra desert of northeastern Jordan. In addition to buildings, and rich chipped stone, faunal, and botanical assemblages, the site has produced a large collection of ground stone tools. This paper presents the result of a preliminary study of the ground stone artefacts associated with the late Natufian phase. Results indicate that while the assemblage is overall very similar to other Natufian sites in the Mediterranean zone, there are also some notable differences. Although grinding rather than pounding tools appear to be more important at the site, many tools were seemingly involved in both grinding and pounding activities. We hypothesize that this dual function could be explained by the processing of rhizome tubers, which were found in abundance at the site, and which may have represented an important food source for the inhabitants. In addition, we argue that the relationship between ground stone tools and cereal processing has been overemphasized and the processing of other plant food resources, in this case tubers could have been equally significant. While the processing of plant foods was one function, many tools are also associated with pigment stains, suggesting that they were involved in the processing of non-vegetal matter

Identifying the chaîne opératoire of club-rush (Bolboschoenus glaucus (Lam.) S.G.Sm) tuber exploitation during the Early Natufian in the Black Desert (northeastern Jordan)

Club-rush (Bolboschoenus spp. (Asch.) Palla) is one of the most common edible wild plant taxa found at Epipaleolithic and Neolithic sites in southwest Asia. At the Early Natufian site of Shubayqa 1 (Black Desert, Jordan) thousands of club-rush rhizome-tuber remains and hundreds of fragments of prepared meals were found. The evidence indicated that the underground storage organs of this plant were recurrently used as a source of food 14,600 years ago. To determine how Early Natufian communities gathered, processed and transformed club-rush tubers into food, we designed an interdisciplinary study that combined experimental archaeology, archaeobotany, and ground and chipped stone tool analyses. We conducted more than 50 specific experiments over three years, and based on the experimental materials produced we inferred that 1) the best season for club-rush rhizome-tuber collection in the region was spring-summer time; 2) that the primary method to harvest the plant would have been uprooting; and 3) that the most efficient approaches to obtain perfectly peeled and clean rhizome-tubers could have entailed drying, roasting and gentle grinding of the tubers. Overall, our work provides important information to reconstruct the chaîne opératoire for club-rush tuber exploitation in the past. The experimental data and modern reference datasets allow us to interpret the archaeological material found at Shubayqa 1, and start identifying some of the activities that Natufian communities in the Black Desert undertook in relation to the exploitation of this particular source of food.Funding to carry out the experiments described in this paper was provided by the H.P. Mindefondet for Dansk Palæstinaforskning, Ingeniør Svend G. Fiedler og Hustrus legat til fremme af botanisk og arkæologisk forskning, the Danish Institute in Damascus, and the “Changing Foodways Project” granted by the Danish council for Independent Research (grant nos. DFF-4001-00068, DFF-801-00133B) to Dr. T. Richter, University of Copenhagen. Permission to conduct excavations at Shubayqa 1 was granted to Dr. T. Richter under license agreement with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Data analyses, interpretation and writing were carried out under A. Arranz-Otaegui’s Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (“FOUNDERS”, MSCAIF grant no. 840228) and Juan de la Cierva Incorporación grant (IJC2019-039647-I). Ingeniør Svend G. Fiedler og Hustrus legat til fremme af botanisk og arkæologisk forskning and the Danish Institute in Damascus provided additional funding for ground stone analysis conducted by P. N. Pedersen. Note that the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We also want to thank Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the Qasr Burqu’ staff, and several members of the Shubayqa Archaeological Project, including T. Richter, A. Shakaiteer, A. Ruter, L. Yeomans, and M. Bangsborg Thuessen among many others, for helping us in the various stages of the work over these years

Free foragers? A case for transient social inequality at Epipalaeolithic Shubayqa, eastern Jordan

Wengrow and Graeber have recently argued that prehistoric forager societies, typically assumed to be strictly egalitarian, may have displayed transient social complexity, consciously alternating between different modes of social organisation on a seasonal or temporary basis. Their case, based primarily on ethnographic and historic analogy, is persuasive, and raises the question of whether we can discern transient complexity in the archaeological record directly. Here we propose the hypothesis that transient complexity can be seen in the Late Epipaleolithic of Southwest Asia. Using the Natufian of Shubayqa (eastern Jordan) as a case study, we point to several features that provide evidence of seasonally alternating modes of social organisation and temporary inequality, e.g. exploitation of seasonal resources, substantial architecture and immobile technology. These findings further challenge the dichotomy between an egalitarian Palaeolithic versus hierarchical post-Neolithic societies

The palaeoenvironmental potential of the eastern Jordanian desert basins (Qe'an)

This paper presents a summary of work undertaken by the authors and their teams on a series of Qe'an (plural of Qa’), in the Badia of eastern Jordan. These basins are foci for settlement in the region, with the sites described here (Shubayqa, Wisad and the Qa’ Qattafi) edged by archaeological sites dating from the late Epipalaeolithic (ca. 14,500 - 11,600 cal BP) and the Neolithic (ca. 11,700 - 6100 cal BP), and in areas still used by people today as seasonal wetlands for watering animals and growing cereal. We assess here the potential for the Qe'an sediments to provide what would be rare continuous palaeoenvironmental records for this part of SW Asia. The paper presents the first dates from the Qe'an of this region and the outline sedimentology. Much of the fill is of Holocene age, which leads to discussion of climate and landscape change over the last 15,000 years, particularly due to the close geographical relationship between these basins and archaeology. Our optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon dating of the basin fill suggests that there was significantly more space in the landscape for water storage in the early Holocene, which may have therefore provided this resource for people and their livestock or game for a longer duration each year than that seen today. Linked to this are hypotheses of a more vegetated landscape during this time period. Given the environmentally marginal nature of our study area subtle changes in landscape and/or climate, and human exploitation of these resources, could have led to significant, and likely detrimental for its inhabitants, environmental impacts for the region, such as desertification. Our data are suggestive of desertification occurring, and sets up a clear hypothesis for testing by future work in the region