Regarding the question of the survival of prehistoric hominin groups in the Arabian Peninsula during arid phases, the geology of karst appears to be an important factor. This is made clear by the ...karst springs, wadi pools and sediment-filled karst depressions (dolines and poljes) found at higher elevation within the central Al-Hajar Mts.
Setting out at the zero point of prehistoric mountain archaeology in Oman, relevant information from hydrogeology, botany, zoology and oases horticulture is compiled and reviewed. The immediate concern is to provide proof for the assumption that karst lithology in the Kawr-Akhdar Area has been able to compensate for some of the negatives of unreliable rainfall in the mountains of northern Oman.
Combining the evidence of the survival of endemic lifeforms with the feasibility of mountain oases, we conclude that long before the harnessing of karst-hydrological features by an oasis economy (in Iron Age 2), surface water has been available in the central and eastern Al-Hajar Mts at elevations higher than 1000 m a.s.l. in an amount to meet the needs of mobile foraging-pastoral groups. From our own study of sediment-filled karst-depressions with lithic scatters at ca. 1000 m a.s.l. on the inner side of the Jebel Kawr, we deduce a hydrologically advantageous effect of aeolian sediment on the fractured karst, here on the southern slope of the mountain chain (“Kawr Exotic”). In this view, quantities of moisture-storing silt progressively began sealing the karst depressions, allowing them to retain surface water and vegetation high up in steep and rugged mountain terrain.
Karst formations evidently provided the barren central and eastern Al-Hajar Mts with “insular” water and sediment locations (huyul, singular hayl), which helped prehistoric groups to cope with phases of aridization. Based on this, we propose the Al-Hajar Mts as a viable prehistoric refugium.
•Al-Hajar Mts (Oman) potentially suited as a prehistoric refugium.•Hydrological effects in karst formations can counterbalance unreliable precipitation.•Karst depressions sealed with aeolian silt provide humidity at high elevation.•Survival of lifeforms during aridization because of mountain conditions.
Archaeologists have recently made tremendous advances in understanding the early ceramic traditions of the prehistoric Near East. Over the past decade there has been a huge increase in research ...focusing on various aspects of ceramic production, its origins and evolution, distribution and consumption in the Late Neolithic (ca. 7000–5000 cal. BC). Fieldwork brings new and exciting finds every year while laboratory studies change our perspectives regarding ceramic technology. Near Eastern ceramic specialists actively engage with, and contribute to, current trends in theoretical archaeology. The first time, the 19 papers presented here bring together specialists discussing Neolithic ceramics from the Near East in the broadest sense. There is a general focus on decorated pottery traditions. What raw materials and ceramic technologies did Late Neolithic peoples employ? How did they paint their designs? How may we analyze decorated ceramics to explore social networks and identities? What did these decorated pottery traditions mean socially? Essential reading to Near Eastern prehistorians, these collected papers provide new insights for anyone interested in the development of early pottery traditions and the social significance of ceramics in Neolithic societies.
In theAnthropologiejournal in 2008 (46, 2–3), Marek Zvelebil and an international team of experts presented the results from theVedrovice bioarchaeology project, which detailed the life-histories of ...individuals buried at the early LBK cemetery. In combining a range of different bioarchaeological methodologies, this project was able to show that the community buried at Vedrovice was formed of a diverse and heterogenous population, leading lives influenced to different degrees by the transition to farming. Drawing on a similar approach – that of using bioarchaeological evidence fully integrated in its archaeological context – a project calledThe first farmers of central Europe: diversity in LBK lifewayswas begun in 2008 and ran for four years. Sampling sites across the southern distribution of the LBK for isotopic analysis (carbon, nitrogen, and strontium isotopes primarily) and including osteological study, this project concentrated on issues of regional and site-based diversity in diet, mobility and burial. In this paper, we present a comparison of the Moravian and western Slovakian results from this project, including new data from the cemetery and settlement burials at Vedrovice, as well as from the Nitra cemetery and the settlements of Těšetice-Kyjovice and Brno-Starý Lískovec/Nový Lískovec. Like Zvelebilet al. (2008), we find communities formed of heterogenous identities, though we suggest that such diversity was also found alongside evidence for shared practice at different scales of human life.
In an attempt to circumvent the deflation problem of lithic sites in the Arabian Peninsula, the archaeo-hydrological project SIPO of the Masaryk University (Brno, Czech Republic) chose a depression ...type that is known for accumulating soil and water in denuded limestone environments: a polje (large karst hollow). The Hayl Al-Ajah (1012 m a.s.l) is located on a small plateau above the village of Sint, at the intermountain front of the Jabal Al-Kawr (Al-Hajar Mountains, northern Oman). During the 2018 test season, a cache-like concentration of twelve pre-cores and cores was found in situ (Feature A/Trench 1), in a sediment pocket that had survived on a rock terrace (Site 1) bordering the polje. Different from the surface scatter (flake industry), the shallow deposit in the trench contains blade and bladelet debitage. Despite the lack of absolute dating, the techno-typological analysis cautiously associates the soil-embedded lithics of Trench 1 (mostly chert) with a more sustained human presence at the polje during the Upper Palaeolithic or Epipalaeolithic period. In contrast, the lithic scatter from the surface of Site 1 (splintered pieces, small end-scrapers, micro-drills, etc., mostly of radiolarite) probably represents traces of shorter visits during the Middle Holocene.
Although the pioneering applications of scientific methods –e.g.scanning electron microscopy and microanalysis (SEM/EDS), X-ray diffraction (XRD), and petrographic analysis – on pigment studies in ...archaeology were published as early as the 1970s (Nollet al.1975; Noll 1976), it is still fair to say that research on Near Eastern Neolithic pottery pigments is in the beginning stages of development (Matson 1983, 621–622; Courtois and Velde 1984; Steinberg and Kamilli 1984; Noll 1991, 233–271; Van Aset al.1998, 34–35, 42–43; Gilbert 2004; Robertet al.2008). In recent years, the microchemical composition of pigments by Laser ablation-inductively coupled
From about 5500 cal BC to soon after 5000 cal BC, the lifeways of the first farmers of central Europe, the LBK culture (Linearbandkeramik), are seen in distinctive practices of longhouse use, ...settlement forms, landscape choice, subsistence, material culture and mortuary rites. Within the five or more centuries of LBK existence a dynamic sequence of changes can be seen in, for instance, the expansion and increasing density of settlement, progressive regionalisation in pottery decoration, and at the end some signs of stress or even localised crisis. Although showing many features in common across its very broad distribution, however, the LBK phenomenon was not everywhere the same, and there is a complicated mixture of uniformity and diversity. This major study takes a strikingly large regional sample, from northern Hungary westwards along the Danube to Alsace in the upper Rhine valley, and addresses the question of the extent of diversity in the lifeways of developed and late LBK communities, through a wide-ranging study of diet, lifetime mobility, health and physical condition, the presentation of the bodies of the deceased in mortuary ritual. It uses an innovative combination of isotopic (principally carbon, nitrogen and strontium, with some oxygen), osteological and archaeological analysis to address difference and change across the LBK, and to reflect on cultural change in general.
This book offers a range of perspectives on current research on Neolithic pottery in ancient Mesopotamia. It was produced by members of a working group established during its founding meeting in Brno ...and Rejvíz (Czech Republic) in January 2012. For this first meeting the group adopted the working title “Painting Pots – Painting People”. Participants attending the workshop personally knew each other from previous work, and represented academic institutions from several countries in Europe, the Middle East and Turkey, the United States and Japan (Fig. 1.1). They habitually met in the field, at regular conferences such as the ICAANE or
Moravia and western Slovakia Alasdair Whittle; R. Alexander Bentley; Penny Bickle ...
The First Farmers of Central Europe,
07/2013
Book Chapter
The Neolithic archaeologies of Moravia and Slovakia, previously provinces first in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and then within Czechoslovakia, and now half of an independent state and a whole state ...themselves, have often been treated separately. This chapter takes them together, with the sites sampled by this project standing as selected and, we hope, preliminary case studies of the numerous LBK communities which inhabited the river valleys and basins running south into the middle Danube. That geography of Danube tributaries may perhaps serve better to define this region of LBK settlement than modern and historical state boundaries (Fig. 4.1). From west
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