Abstract
Between 23 and 11.5 ka Epipaleolithic groups of Southwest Asia initiated and experienced dramatic changes—on a previously unprecedented scale—in economy and settlement, with the appearance of semi-sedentary villages and intensified interdependent relationships with each other and specific plants and animals. These events provide a rare opportunity to study the long-term development of social processes in the region and the increasingly obvious fact that social, economic and technological changes were manifested as complex, entangled and non-linear developments. Most recent attempts to explain change in the material culture record typically highlight the earliest evidence for plant management or cultivation, ritual funerary practices, and dwelling and architecture. While these are important contributions that serve as the foundation for challenging our traditional notions of hunter-gatherer to farmer transitions, they center on changes in the economic or symbolic realms of prehistoric life, arguably downplaying the role of technology. This paper attempts to explore the role of technology in our reconstructions of the lifeways of hunter-gatherers by examining the social role of technology, the centrality of the technological process to everyday practice, and the transmission of technological knowledge (and, thus, culture) through communities of practice. We use chipped stone tools and their associated debris from the site of Kharaneh IV, eastern Jordan, as an illustrative case study of how we currently study chipped stone tools in this region. Using a chaîne opératoire approach to the study of EP assemblages, we consider how different groups of knappers at the EP site of Kharaneh IV, and beyond, interacted in fluid and ever-changing interactions to share knowledge or reinforce existing social traditions.
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- 1.
- 2.
We emphasize here that this homogeneity is relative to what is exhibited earlier in the EP—the Natufian is not the ‘same’ across the entire region, but, rather, these Late EP sites share a number of features that make their ascription to the Natufian accepted by most researchers. Notably, the most widely-recognized of these features is a chipped stone tool technology focused on the production of small geometric microliths, namely crescents or lunates. These sites are found from the Sinai Peninsula north to southern Anatolia across to the Iranian Plateau and, possibly, west to the island of Cyprus.
- 3.
We should note that whether you adhere to one school or the other results from your training, not your nationality. Thus, many North American scholars trained in Europe follow a chaîne opératoire approach. Additionally, these boundaries, such as they are, are increasingly blurred today with the predominance of collaborative research projects.
- 4.
Even in so-called opportunistic knapping events, the knapper still begins the process with a plan.
- 5.
Despite this exposure, only EP material culture is noted from the surface and subsurface deposits.
- 6.
- 7.
Following Wilke and Quintero, we pay particular attention to technologically-diagnostic core trimming pieces. A publication that details and illustrates our analytical approach is forthcoming.
- 8.
While microburins generally represent unmodified and technically debitage, they are categorized alongside tools because of their highly distinctive appearance and value as a diagnostic cultural-chronological feature, like microliths, of specific EP entities.
- 9.
Of course, some degree of time-averaging cannot be ruled out; however, the time gaps between adjacent contexts is very small.
- 10.
We recognize that these sites do exhibit a degree of variability in geometric (and non-geometric) microlith forms; however, only a few of these types usually make up a large proportion of the microlith assemblage.
- 11.
Although backing is not discussed in detail here, in general, different backing styles (bipolar, abrupt, fine, inverse, alternating, etc.) are used as attributes to define different microlithic tools forms and, thus, industries or cultural groups.
- 12.
Geomorphological work in the Azraq Basin, especially around Kharaneh IV, indicates that rates of surface deposition and erosion are slow, with deflation being a major cause of landscape change (Fuchs, M., Dietze, M., Al-Qudah, K., & Lomax, J. (2015). Dating desert pavements–First results from a challenging environmental archive. Quaternary Geochronology, 30, 342–349.) This deflation disproportionately affects unconsolidated Quaternary sediments more so than consolidated limestone bedrock from which the flint erodes. In any case, over time this erosion would only ensure an ongoing supply of highly local flint and not explain the increase in diversity in the Middle EP, or explain why Early EP groups, whose sites are documented throughout the basin, would not have had access to other (nearby!) sources.
- 13.
Although, of course, not all hinged terminations are necessarily mistakes (Tixier 1979).
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Maher, L.A., Macdonald, D.A. (2020). Communities of Interaction: Tradition and Learning in Stone Tool Production Through the Lens of the Epipaleolithic of Kharaneh IV, Jordan. In: Groucutt, H. (eds) Culture History and Convergent Evolution. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46126-3_11
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