Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: the Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

Abstract

Most archaeological projects today integrate, at least to some degree, how past people engaged with their surroundings, including both how they strategized resource use, organized technological production, or scheduled movements within a physical environment, as well as how they constructed cosmologies around or created symbolic connections to places in the landscape. However, there are a multitude of ways in which archaeologists approach the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human-landscape interrelationships. This paper explores some of these approaches for reconstructing the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 23,000-11,500 years BP) landscape of Southwest Asia, using macro-and microscale geoarchaeological approaches to examine how everyday practices leave traces of human-landscape interactions in northern and eastern Jordan. The case studies presented here demonstrate that these Epipalaeolithic groups engaged in complex and far-reaching social landscapes. Examination of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic (EP) highlights that the notion of BNeolithization^is somewhat misleading as many of the features we use to define this transition were already well-established patterns of behavior by the Neolithic. Instead, these features and practices were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview.

Ritual stone‐built architecture and shell midden foundation: A semisubterranean structure in hyperarid Atacama Desert coast, Northern Chile

“…A significant aspect of the floor is that it consists of a single microlayer. Well preserved living floors appear in stratigraphy as complex sequences composed of several thin layers (1–5 cm), or as massive or poorly stratified layers (e.g., Karkanas & Goldberg, 2019; Maher, 2019). At Structure‐2 of Zapatero, the absence of several thin layers cannot be explained as the result of erosion of multiple sequences, as the upper contact is not erosive (contact mfT 5–mfT 6).…”

“…Considering the specificity of the stratigraphy‐making actions, we argue that the depositional sequence of Structure‐2 is the material product of ritualized acts ( sensu Bell, 1992) linked to the commemoration of the child deceased, and possibly with purposeful acts of place‐making along the built environment of the Atacama Desert coast (Maher, 2019). These acts were not necessarily in opposition to day‐to‐day activities.…”

The Formation of Early Neolithic Communities in the Central Zagros: An 11,500 Year‐old Communal Structure at Asiab

“…While Watkins (2004a; 2004b) has argued that the construction of houses and special purpose buildings during the early Neolithic is representative of a new worldview. Place‐making and the creation of shared experiences and memories may, of course, be much older than the Neolithic and appears to have deep roots in the Palaeolithic (Maher 2019; Maher and Conkey 2019). Through coming together in the joint enterprise of communal building projects communities in the tenth millennium BCE were assembling themselves into different social structures.…”

Emerging evidence of plant domestication as a landscape-level process

“…The period following the Last Glacial Maximum, ~20 kyr BP, is associated with intensified foraging in China [28] and Southwest Asia [29], possibly driven by overhunting and climatic amelioration [30][31][32][33]. During the Epipalaeolithic in the Near East (24-11 kyr BP), increasingly complex microlithic toolkits emerged, along with increased social communication revealed by long-distance exchange of obsidian and seashells, and increased investment in settlement structures [34][35][36]. Similarly, central places became established in the landscape in East Asia and new ceramic and microlithic technologies arose during this same period [28,37] cultivation regimes [38,39].…”