Our project is to excavate at the Mughr el-Hamamah site and carefully process large samples of 40,000-year-old sediment. Our work from June 29-July 29, 2017, requires $27,300. We have received $19,993 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. This amount covers the costs of research in Jordan, including administrative fees and salary that supports the Jordanian Department of Antiquities supervising our work and protecting the site as cultural heritage. It also covers lodging, the costs of renting the Yarmouk University's field laboratory facilities, vehicle rental, research supplies, food and water, and a night guard to protect the site. The Wenner-Gren Foundation grant will generously allow Aaron, Liv, and Chantel to work with two graduate assistants, and four undergraduate students. We seek the balance of $7300 to cover the researchers' roundtrip airfare. We also seek to cover shipping costs and customs inspection fees for scientific/loaned artifact samples.

Additional Information

The Mughr el-Hamamah (Caves of the Doves) overlook the Jordan River Valley. Located in the Ajloun governate, Jordan, the site is northwest of Amman and roughly opposite the Nablus mountains in the West Bank.

We carried out a test excavation season at Mughr el-Hamamah in 2010. Before that, the site had been inventoried but never been excavated. The first thing that struck us was that the sediments in the main cave preserved a single intact prehistoric layer, which immediately underlay recent shepherd deposits. In some places, the layer rich with Stone Age artifacts and animal bones was eroding onto the surface of the cave.

We have worked with a larger team of colleagues to analyze the animal bones (Drs. Jamie Clark, Miriam Belmaker, and Gideon Hartman), stone tool artifacts (Dr. John Shea), radiocarbon dating of select charcoal fragments (Drs. Jason Rech and Jeff Pigati and Aaron Stutz and Mr. Jim Wilson), botanical structure of select charcoal fragments (Drs. Eleni Asouti and Chantel White), microstructure and geochemistry of the sediments (Drs. Rosa Albert, Trina Arpin, and Mónica Alonso-Eguíluz), and composition of characteristic plant silica crystals known as phytoliths (Drs. Albert and Alonso-Eguíluz). Dr. Liv Nilsson Stutz and Dr. Fred Grine confirmed the identification of one human bone fragment, and Dr. Daniela Bar-Yosef Meyer identified a single Mediterranean sea shell bead. We plan to work with Drs. Amy Prendergast and Dustin White to carry out additional studies of the ancient environment. And Dr. Fuad Hourani has provided invaluable insight into the geological formation of the Jordan Valley during this broader period, known as the Upper Pleistocene.

To summarize the main findings: the stone tools are distinctive to the Early Upper Paleolithic period; the radiocarbon dates narrow the occupation period down to 45-39,000 years ago; the activities occurring on site involve a lot of scraping and cutting, but it was relatively less important to make fine blades and points (gearing up for hunting or gathering trips); still, the inhabitants were bringing hunted gazelles, goats, ibex, deer, and other animals back to the site. The microscopic phytoliths include crystals only found in fruit (as opposed to wood, leaves, or stalks). Most notably, there are large chunks of wood charcoal that preserve at least bits with botanical structure, the site preserves evidence of hunter-gatherers bringing back a lot of wood.

Mughr el-Hamamah has extraordinary potential to yield different kinds of samples for reconstructing the vegetation, animal communities, and climate around the site. It has similarly high-resolution potential to allow reconstruction of what hunter-gatherers were doing ... and not just when they were hunting and gathering. We can begin to answer what they were doing on raw-material provisioning trips; what they were doing while working on site; how they constructed windbreaks or other shelters; and how they used hearth fires for cooking and warmth while sleeping.

We have hypothesized that an important aspect of hunter-gatherer behavior at Mughr el-Hamamah was this: the intensification of division of labor. We base this on evidence for a wide range of stone tool types--including those hafted into handles and those expediently made and grasped directly for cutting activities. We also base our hypothesis on evidence for extensive use of plant materials and red ochre mineral brought into the cave. We suspect that some group members were remaining on site, carrying out task activities, while others were hunting, gathering, and provisioning, before transporting food and raw materials back to the caves. This may be associated with shorter moves from one camp to the next, and thus, smaller territories. What may have been a marginal change in labor organization, compared to earlier Neandertals in the region, could have resulted in a more stable or resilient omnivorous diet, ironically leading to higher population growth, helping to explain why anatomically modern humans eventually spread out of Africa, into the Levant, and across Eurasia.

In order to begin testing this hypothesis, we need to excavate more. In particular, we need to obtain larger, more representative samples—especially of charred plant remains—from Mughr el-Hamamah.

This Summer, from late June to July, we will work intensely with two graduate assistants and four undergraduate students, to excavate, process, catalog and begin describing the charred botanical remains and other samples. In addition to the charcoal and other carbonized plant remains (hopefully including seed and nut shell fragments), we expect to find more campfire features, animal bones, stone tools and tool-manufacture debris, shell beads, bone tools or points, and microscopic phytolith remains of plant tissues. Research team members Rosa Albert, Mónica Alonso-Eguíluz, and Dustin White plan to visit for a week during our field season, in July, to take sediment samples for phytolith and other laboratory analyses. We will carry out our work under the auspices of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan. Once we complete our field season, more detailed laboratory analyses will begin, including Chantel’s collaborative work with Eleni Asouti to document and identify the different plant species and plant tissues preserved in different parts of the cave.

Our team needs your support to carry out the first majory step--comprehensive field work.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The collaborative research that has gotten us to this point--with our peers recommending that the Wenner-Gren Foundation fund our Summer 2017 research--has depended on support from many sources, including:

Oxford College of Emory Unversity (The Oxford College Pierce Institute for Leadership and Community Engagement, the Gregory-Rackley Career Development Award, the Faculty Development Committee, and the Allen Grant program)

The National Science Foundation (grant number 1025352 to Aaron Stutz and Liv Nilsson Stutz)

The L S B Leakey Foundation

Alexander von Humboldt Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (to Dr. Jamie Clark)

FURTHER READING

http://esciencecommons.blogspot.com/2015/06/stone-tools-from-jordan-point-to-dawn.html

https://bioculturalevolution.n...