Preliminary characterization and regional comparison of the Dasht-i-Nawur obsidian source near Ghazni,Afghanistan

Archaeologists have known that an obsidian source exists in the Dasht-i-Nawur basin of central Afghanistan since at least the 1970s; however, regional political turmoil and instability have prevented in-depth study of this source. Data presented here from recent analyses of archival specimens of obsidian collected during a 1976 survey provide a preliminary geochemical profile for this obsidian source. These data suggest that the Dasht-i-Nawur source is easily distinguishable from other obsidian sources in the Near East and southwest Asia. Comparison of these data to an existing database of artifact compositional profiles suggests that initial hypotheses about restricted distribution of the Dasht obsidian may be correct. These data provide for the first time the characterization of a long-known but poorly studied obsidian source. Additionally, this study serves as one example of the benefits gained through working to maintain and preserve data archives of now-closed laboratories.     

Approaches to Prehistoric Diet Breadth, Demography, and Prey Ranking Systems in Time and Space

Zooarchaeological data on small game use hold much potential for identifying and dating Paleolithic demographic pulses in time and space, such as those associated with modern human origins and the evolution of food-producing economies. Although small animals were important to human diets throughout the Middle, Upper, and Epi-Paleolithic periods in the Mediterranean Basin, the types of small prey emphasized by foragers shifted dramatically over the last 200,000 years. Slow-growing, slow-moving tortoises, and marine mollusks dominate the Middle Paleolithic record of small game exploitation. Later, agile, fast-maturing animals became increasingly important in human diets, first birds in the early Upper Paleolithic, and soon thereafter hares and rabbits. While the findings of this study are consistent with the main premise of Flannery's Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) hypothesis (Flannery, K. V. (1969). In Ucko, P. J., and Dimbleby, G. W. (eds.), The Domestication and Exploitation of Plants and Animals, Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago, pp. 73–100), it is now clear that human diet breadth began to expand much earlier than the Pleistocene/Holocene transition. Ranking small prey in terms of work of capture (in the absence of special harvesting tools) proves far more effective in this investigation of human diet breadth than taxonomy-based diversity analyses published previously. Our analyses expose a major shift in human predator–prey dynamics involving small game animals by 50–40 KYA in the Mediterranean Basin, with earliest population growth pulses occurring in the Levant. In a separate application to the Natufian period (13–10 KYA), just prior to the rise of Neolithic societies in the Levant, great intensification is apparent from small game use. This effect is most pronounced at the onset of this short culture period, and is followed by an episode of local depopulation during the Younger Dryas, without further changes in the nature of Natufian hunting adaptations. An essential feature of the diachronic and synchronic approaches outlined here is controlling the potentially conflating effects of spatial (biogeographic) and temporal variation in the faunal data sets.     

The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levant

Particular geographic features of the Mediterranean Levant underlie the subsistence patterns and social structures reconstructed from the archaeological remains of Epi-Paleolithic groups. The Kebaran, Geometric Kebaran, and Mushabian complexes are defined by technotypological features that reflect the distributions of social units. Radiocarbon dating and paleoclimatic data permit us to trace particular groups who, facing environmental fluctuations, made crucial changes in subsistence strategies, which, in the southern Levant, led to sedentism in base camps on the ecotone of the Mediterranean woodland-parkland and the Irano-Turanian steppe. The establishment of Early Natufian sedentary communities led to a regional change in settlement pattern. The relatively cold and dry climate of the eleventh millennium B.P. forced Negev groups into a special arid adpatation. The early Holocene onset of wetter and warmer conditions favored the earliest Neolithic (PPNA) development of village life based on the cultivation of barley and legumes, gathering of wild seeds and fruits and continued hunting.