a b s t r a c tWith a specific focus on eastern Jordan, the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project explores changing hunteregatherer strategies, behaviours and adaptations to this vast area throughout the Late Pleistocene. In particular, we examine how lifeways here (may have) differed from surrounding areas and what circumstances drew human and animal populations to the region. Integrating multiple material cultural and environmental datasets, we explore 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. Here we discuss particular aspects of the Kharaneh IV material record within the context of ongoing palaeoenvironmental reconstructions and place these findings in the wider spatial and temporal narratives of the Azraq Basin.

Even though pivotal for understanding many aspects of human behaviour, preservation and storage of animal resources has not received great attention from archaeologists. One could argue that the main problem lies in the difficulties of demonstrating meat storage archaeologically due to the lack of direct evidence. This paper represents an attempt to refine zooarchaeological methods for the recognition of meat preservation and storage at prehistoric sites. Drawing on the faunal assemblage from Kharaneh IV, an Early/Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site in eastern Jordan, this study demonstrates that a combination of taphonomic and contextual analyses alongside ethnographic information may indeed lead archaeologists to insights not directly available from the archaeological record. The empirical evidence presented here contributes to the archaeological visibility of meat preservation and storage, providing a clearer concept of the nature of these practices in preagricultural societies.

This paper presents a new tomb complex of the Late Bronze Age at Palaepaphos-Teratsoudhia in south-west Cyprus. Although looted, Tomb 288 yielded a representative repertoire of funerary gifts, including seals and scarabs, ranging chronologically from the very beginning of the Late Bronze Age to Late Cypriote IIC, roughly from 1650 to 1200 BC. Tomb 288 has characteristics which are typical of Late Bronze Age tomb architecture in Cyprus and well known in the Paphos region, as well as aspects which have not previously been observed in any necropolis of the period, such as the large central “pillars” which support the roof in Chambers A and B. The tomb’s finds comprise representative examples of the ceramic production of Palaepaphos for a period of some 400 years and illustrate the wealth of this region during the whole of the Late Bronze Age. The tomb is a significant addition, in particular, to our knowledge of the earliest phase of the city’s existence, a period which is not adequately known since the focus of recent research has primarily been on the latest phase of the Late Bronze Age and the early part of the Iron Age.