PALÉORIENT vol. 8/1 1982

SHEEP BONES

FROM THE NEGEV EPIPALAEOLITHIC

S. DA VIS, /V. GORING-MORRIS and A. GOPHER

Introduction

The sheep in common with the goat, cow and pig appears to have been domesticated very early by man in the Old World probably in the Near East. All such farmyard animals were bred from wild forebears, and it is of course important to determine the original distribution of these when studying patterns of early domestication.

Modern distributions of wild species are not altogether helpful in this respect, for since the advent of agriculture and the intensification of hunting in more recent times, the habitat and populations of many large mammals will naturally have been reduced. For example : in the Near East the wild bezoar goat (the ancestor of the present-day domestic goat) did once inhabit northern Israel (1) but within the Near East is now restricted to northern Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Today wild sheep are found in Turkey, northern Iraq and Iran, and extend east into the Panjab, while a relict population exists in Oman (2). In former times their distribution must have been more widespread : Payne (in press) has found sheep bones at a Mousterian site in Syria (Douara cave, near Palmyra) and Clutton-Brock and Uerpmann (3) found 14 sheep bones in Aceramic Neolithic levels at Jericho.

Could this have represented the limits of prehistoric sheep distribution ? The absence of sheep bones from Palaeolithic-Epipalaeolithic sites in northern and central Israel led one of us (SD) to believe that wild sheep never extended that far south in the Near East; and that any

presence in an archaeological assemblage would signify the introduction of domestic sheep by man. This belief now has to be questioned.

We can now report findings of unmistakable sheep bones from three Epipalaeolithic sites in the central Negev desert. And we are inclined therefore to think that wild sheep may have had a distribution which included the semi-arid steppe skirting the fertile western parts (the coastal strip) of the Levant.

Archaeology

Ramat Harif (G 8) and Abu Salem are two terminal Epipalaeolithic occupation sites located in the central Negev highlands in Israel. The sites were originally discovered and investigated by an expedition from Southern Methodist University (4), and were used as the basis for the definition of the 9th millennium ВС Hari- fian culture, which appears to have been restricted to the Negev and Sinai. It was argued that these two sites were sizeable villages and that while Abu Salem contained substantial in situ deposits, the nearby site of Ramat Harif (G 8) was totally deflated. The abundant faunal sample recovered from Abu Salem was interpreted as consisting predominantly of gazelle and goat (5).

However, two seasons of intensive excavations at both sites in 1980 and 1981 , conducted under the direction of two of us (N G-M and AG) as part of the emergency archaeological survey of the Negev, have revealed that extensive in situ deposits are present in both sites, and that both sites probably represent residential base camps rather than villages (6).

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