Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
82
result(s) for
"Finlayson, Bill"
Sort by:
Evidence for food storage and predomestication granaries 11,000 years ago in the Jordan Valley
Food storage is a vital component in the economic and social package that comprises the Neolithic, contributing to plant domestication, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and new social organizations. Recent excavations at Dhra' near the Dead Sea in Jordan provide strong evidence for sophisticated, purpose-built granaries in a predomestication context [almost equal to]11,300-11,175 cal B.P., which support recent arguments for the deliberate cultivation of wild cereals at this time. Designed with suspended floors for air circulation and protection from rodents, they are located between residential structures that contain plant-processing instillations. The granaries represent a critical evolutionary shift in the relationship between people and plant foods, which precedes the emergence of domestication and large-scale sedentary communities by at least 1,000 years.
Journal Article
Constructing community in the Neolithic of southern Jordan: Quotidian practice in communal architecture
The emergence of food production during the earliest Neolithic of the Near East was accompanied by profound changes in the ways in which societies were organized. Elaborate and multi-stage mortuary practices involving the removal, caching, and plastering of symbolically charged skulls are thought to have played an important role in cross-cutting household lines to integrate communities and maintain social cohesion during the late tenth to ninth millennium cal BP, particularly in Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B settlements located in the southern Levant. While the ritual and mortuary activities associated with skull manipulation were dramatic and high impact occasions that drew people and households together, it is likely they were highly episodic and, consequently, attendant community cohesion susceptible to decay over time. Recent research in southern Jordan, where skull plastering was not practiced as seen elsewhere in the southern Levant, has revealed that non-residential building structures were a common feature of early Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlements. Renewed excavations at Beidha, a Middle PPNB settlement located in the Shara'a mountains, have revealed a large, easily accessible communal structure that provided a focal point in which mundane, informal daily activities could regularly take place. The routine and repeated interactions fostered by such non-domestic structures facilitated highly durable modes of community cohesion and was part of a temporally deep ethos of community that first emerged a thousand years earlier when people first began to experiment with plant cultivation. It appears that in southern Jordan, a distinctive social cohesion pathway developed that engaged community daily practice within non-residential buildings to maintain and strengthen social structures, rather than occasional and dramatic ritual and mortuary practices used elsewhere in the southern Levant.
Journal Article
The Diversity of Hunter Gatherer Pasts
This thought provoking collection of new research papers explores the extent of variation amongst hunting and gathering peoples past and present and the considerable analytical challenges presented by this diversity. This problem is especially important in archaeology, where increasing empirical evidence illustrates ways of life that are not easily encompassed within the range of variation recognized in the contemporary world of surviving hunter-gatherers. Put simply, how do past hunter-gatherers fit into our understandings of hunter-gatherers? Furthermore, given the inevitable archaeological reliance on analogy, it is important to ask whether conceptions of hunter-gatherers based on contemporary societies restrict our comprehension of past diversity and of how this changes over the long term. Discussion of hunter-gatherers shows them to be varied and flexible, but modeling of contemporary hunter-gatherers has not only reduced them into essential categories, but has also portrayed them as static and without history. It is often said that the study of hunter-gatherers can provide insight into past forms of social organization and behavior; unfortunately too often it has limited our understandings of these societies. In contrast, contributors here explore past hunter-gather diversity over time and space to provide critical perspectives on general models of ‘hunter-gatherers’ and attempt to provide new perspectives on hunter-gatherer societies from the greater diversity present in the past.
eBook
Architecture, sedentism, and social complexity at Pre-Pottery Neolithic A WF16, Southern Jordan
Recent excavations at Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) WF16 in southern Jordan have revealed remarkable evidence of architectural developments in the early Neolithic. This sheds light on both special purpose structures and \"domestic\" settlement, allowing fresh insights into the development of increasingly sedentary communities and the social systems they supported. The development of sedentary communities is a central part of the Neolithic process in Southwest Asia. Architecture and ideas of homes and households have been important to the debate, although there has also been considerable discussion on the role of communal buildings and the organization of early sedentarizing communities since the discovery of the tower at Jericho. Recently, the focus has been on either northern Levantine PPNA sites, such as Jerf el Ahmar, or the emergence of ritual buildings in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B of the southern Levant. Much of the debate revolves around a division between what is interpreted as domestic space, contrasted with \"special purpose\" buildings. Our recent evidence allows a fresh examination of the nature of early Neolithic communities.
Journal Article
The flow of ideas: shared symbolism during the Neolithic emergence in Southwest Asia: WF16 and Göbekli Tepe
During the Late Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic, societies across the Levant transformed their social, cultural and economic organisation, with new forms of food production, architecture and material culture. But to what extent were regional developments connected and how, in particular, did ideas and objects flow between the most southern and northern reaches of Southwest Asia? Finds from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of WF16 in southern Jordan resonate with those from Göbekli Tepe and other sites hundreds of kilometres to the north. Emphasising shared symbolism and ideology, the authors explore how connections may have arisen and how they were maintained, revealing expansive social networks spanning Southwest Asia that underpinned the emergence of farming.
Journal Article
The flow of ideas: shared symbolism during the Neolithic emergence in Southwest Asia: WF16 and Gobekli Tepe
During the Late Epipalaeolithic and Early Neolithic, societies across the Levant transformed their social, cultural and economic organisation, with new forms of food production, architecture and material culture. But to what extent were regional developments connected and how, in particular, did ideas and objects flow between the most southern and northern reaches of Southwest Asia? Finds from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site of WF16 in southern Jordan resonate with those from Gobekli Tepe and other sites hundreds of kilometres to the north. Emphasising shared symbolism and ideology, the authors explore how connections may have arisen and how they were maintained, revealing expansive social networks spanning Southwest Asia that underpinned the emergence of farming.
Journal Article
A lost campaign? New evidence of Roman temporary camps in northern Arabia
Remote sensing survey in southern Jordan has identified at least three Roman temporary camps that indicate a probable undocumented military campaign into what is today Saudi Arabia, and which we conjecture is linked to the Roman annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in AD 106.
Journal Article