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Seasonality of the Final Natufian occupation at Eynan/Ain Mallaha (Israel): an approach combining dental ageing, mesowear and microwear

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Abstract

The Final Natufian level Ib from Eynan/Ain Mallaha provided a large and diversified assemblage of ungulates used here to study the seasonality of game procurement. The objective of this study was to evaluate the advantage of combining two methods, dental eruption and wear, and tooth microwear. Tooth microwear results allowed us to confirm the seasonality of procurement of red and roe deer and to narrow down its duration for the gazelle and the fallow deer. Game procurement occurred throughout the year for the roe deer. Red deer were hunted in spring and summer, and gazelle in late autumn–early winter. This approach allowed us to improve the accuracy of seasonality estimates and to increase sample size by using the entire population (young and adult individuals) for each species. The few individuals that were analysed with the two methods also permitted us to characterize the diet of the population at the time of death.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to C. Azorit for providing us with information on the birth period of red deer in the Sierra de Andújar region. We are grateful to Esther Lachman for editing the manuscript. Finally, we acknowledge the three reviewers whose comments helped to improve this manuscript.

Code availability

MicrowearBivaR: a Code to Create Tooth Microwear Bivariate Plots in R. Zenodo, Version 1. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2587575.

Funding

This work was supported by a mobility grant to FR (Salvador de Madariaga grant PRX17/00116 from the Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte). The research of FR is supported by projects 2017 SGR 836 from the Generalitat de Catalunya, projects HAR2016-76760-C3-1-P and PID2019-103987GB-C31 from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the CERCA Program/Generalitat de Catalunya. The research at Eynan/Ain Mallaha is supported by the PRC CNRS-MOST 2018–2020 ‘Human Impact on the Northern Jordan Valley (Hula Valley) using archaeological and genetic proxies’ (A. Bridault and R. Rabinovich, coordinators).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICREA, Pg. Lluís Companys 23, 08010, Barcelona, Spain

    Florent Rivals

  2. Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Zona Educacional 4, Campus Sescelades URV (Edifici W3), 43007, Tarragona, Spain

    Florent Rivals

  3. Departament d’Història i Història de l’Art, Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Avinguda de Catalunya 35, 43002, Tarragona, Spain

    Florent Rivals

  4. Institute of Archaeology, National Natural History Collections, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Rivka Rabinovich

  5. Israel Antiquities Authority, P. O. B. 586, 91004, Jerusalem, Israel

    Hamoudi Khalaily

  6. CNRS, UMR 7041 ArScAn – Ethnologie préhistorique, M. S. H. Mondes, 92000, Nanterre, France

    François Valla

  7. CNRS, UMR 7041 ArScAn – Archéologies environnementales, M. S. H. Mondes, 92000, Nanterre, France

    Anne Bridault

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Rivals, F., Rabinovich, R., Khalaily, H. et al. Seasonality of the Final Natufian occupation at Eynan/Ain Mallaha (Israel): an approach combining dental ageing, mesowear and microwear. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 232 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01190-3

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