2017-02-01 Lisa Maher - Persistent Places or Occupying Wide Open Spaces?

Persistent Places or Occupying Wide Open Spaces? Alternative Pathways to ‘Neolithization’ in the prehistory of the Near East
01 February 2017, ARF Brownbag
Speaker: Lisa Maher (Anthropology, UC Berkeley)
With a specific focus on eastern Jordan, the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project explores changing hunter-gatherer strategies, behaviors and adaptations to this vast area throughout the Late Pleistocene. In particular, we examine how lifeways here compare to surrounding areas and what circumstances drew human and animal populations to the region. Integrating multiple material cultural and environmental datasets, I discuss some of the strategies of these eastern Jordanian groups that resulted in changes in settlement, subsistence and interaction and, in some areas, the occupation of substantial aggregation sites. Five years of excavation at the aggregation site of Kharaneh IV suggest some very intriguing technological and social on-site activities, as well as adaptations to a dynamic landscape unlike that of today.