Issue: January/February 2004
Research in Action
HUNTERS & FARMERS
Solved: mystery of the missing 1,000 years
La Trobe University archaeologists believe they have helped solve the mystery of a 'missing' 1,000 years of human history that has puzzled Middle Eastern archaeologists for more than a decade.
Working at the neolithic site of Zharat adh-Dhra' 2 (ZAD 2) in Jordan, the La Trobe team has sought evidence of the timetable of man's transition from nomadic hunter-gatherer to sedentary farmer.
Under the direction of La Trobe's Archaeology Program Co-ordinator, senior lecturer, Dr Phillip Edwards, the team has excavated for three 'seasons' at ZAD 2 on the south eastern shore of the Dead Sea in Jordan - 180 metres below sea level.
The site belongs to the earliest transitional period of farming in the Middle East, known as the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) period.
Results from ZAD 2 indicate that the PPNA period lasted far longer than was previously accepted, down to 8,300BC - opposed to 9,200BC as the majority of archaeologists in the southern Levant have argued for more than a decade. These scholars claimed that the next, more intensified period of farming (the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B period - PPNB) developed in the south after 9,200BC.
Dr Edwards and La Trobe doctoral student, Mr Ghattas Sayej, argue, along with a minority of other archaeologists, that the trouble with this scheme is that there have been no unequivocally dated archaeological sites to fill it - hence the missing 1,000 years.
They say that ZAD 2 provides the answer to the conundrum that the PPNA in the south went on far longer than has been accepted. Dr Edwards and Mr Sayej will present a paper on their conclusions at a Pre-Pottery Neolithic Workshop at Fréjus, France in March, 2004 at which exponents of the two hypotheses will shape up for a 'chronological showdown'.
Dr Edwards says it was not just a matter of changing the time lines up and down a few hundred years.
'Our new results for the south coincide with very similar dates for the dispersal of the PPNB from Syria (9,200 BC) westward to Cyprus and northward to Turkey. Our revised chronology opens up the possibility of discovering a new mechanism for the dispersal of initial farming systems.'
Archaeo-botanical research by La Trobe PhD candidate, Mr John Meadows, at ZAD 2 has greatly clarified the transition to cultivation from hunting and gathering. By examining remnants of grains - such as barley and wheat, and pulses and pistachio nuts - he concluded that there must have been a period of 'pre-domestication cultivation', in which the wild ancestors of domestic crops like barley and wheat were intentionally cultivated.
'The theory holds that our forebears certainly began planting crops from about 9,250 BC, but the grains they planted for around 1,000 years continued to be the wild varieties, leading to the mistaken conclusion that they had been gathered in the wild during those 1,000 years and not cultivated.'
During the third season, the La Trobe team included a geological survey carried out by Ms Emily House for her Honours thesis, under the guidance of supervisor Dr John Webb of Earth Sciences.
Their detailed map will help to pinpoint the poor patches of stony alluvium on which the Neolithic farmers may have sown their seed.
'The PPNA is a critical period in the development of food production in the Middle East,' says Dr Edwards.
'When the PPNA was first defined at Jericho, it appeared to coincide with the domestication of cereals and legumes, and thus with the beginning of agriculture. Subsequent work by our team and others, however, showed PPNA food plants to be essentially wild types.'
This theory was backed up by independent work by French archaeologists from the University of Lyon based at the Institute of Middle Eastern Prehistory at the Commanderie de Jalès, in the Department of the Ardèche. Dr Edwards learned details of their recent work during an OSP study visit to Jalès in 2002.
'The Jalès team's research into earliest agriculture in Syria closely parallels our work in the same time periods in Jordan, under the auspices of our ARC-funded joint La Trobe-Arizona State University Archaeology and Environment of the Dead Sea Plain project,' Dr Edwards says.
'My visit to Jalès resulted in the interchange of much important and unpublished evidence which strongly influenced our ability to piece together the chronological puzzle of the northern Levant and the southern Levant.'
Language barriers - research in the northern Levant is predominantly carried out by French-speaking archaeologists and that in the south by those who speak English - have also hindered the integration of research results to date, he adds.
The La Trobe research features in a recently completed three-part docu-mentary on the origins of farming and village life. Leading film-makers Beyond Productions spent several days with the La Trobe team in Jordan filming Stories from the Stone Age, scheduled to be broadcast by ABC television this year.
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