Collaborative Research: Spatial Utilization and Social Interaction in Non-Complex Socieites

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Most of the world's societies today rely on food produced by humans, whether by farming or other aspects of landscape management. Dr. Lisa Maher, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Danielle Macdonald, of the University of Tulsa, examine the long-term impacts of the transition from hunting, gathering, and fishing to the earliest food-producing societies in prehistory located in the Middle East. While this transition was gradual and nonlinear, with lots of fits and starts, comparatively little research has been done on the hunter-gatherer communities whose lifeways set the stage for the origins of agriculture and later urbanization. This research explores this earlier period, approximately 20,000 years ago, to understand changing social organization and human-environment interactions through the analysis of a large hunter-gatherer aggregation site, and to reconstruct the broader social and economic relationships between people at this site and others in the surrounding hunter-gatherer world. Changes in the mechanisms of social organization during this time are integral to understanding how hunter-gatherer groups organized themselves and how these lifeways were re-organized with food-production, changing how people perceived and understood the natural world. Combining excavations at a hunter-gatherer aggregation site with analysis of occupation traces, material culture ties to contemporary sites, and environmental records permits rigorous evaluation of prehistoric adaptations to fluctuating environmental conditions and the sustainability of different lifeways. Today, these issues remain at the forefront of local, national and global agendas as populations invest in evidence-based water conservation strategies. Understanding the responses of past people, foragers and farmers alike, to changing environmental and water resources provides a necessary long term record of adaptation and has great impact for future planning. Partnering with local Jordanian communities and institutions, this research supports local initiatives to provide education about related climate and culture change and promote heritage conservation and environmental stewardship, particularly with local communities. To address long-term changes and explore the nature of hunter-gatherer behavior at the cusp of agriculture, Drs. Macdonald and Maher, along with an international team of researchers, will examine the high-resolution archaeological record of multi-season, prolonged and repeated habitation of the region's largest and densest hunter-gatherer aggregation site in Jordan. Here, ~20,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers congregated from across the region, leaving traces of architectural structures, human burials, and symbolic artifacts, hinting at emerging village settlement, economic intensification, and ritual behaviors associated with dwelling and intensive landscape use almost 10,000 years earlier than previously known from Neolithic farming villages. Through these lines of evidence, researchers examine how people were integrated into a broader regional landscape of social interaction and how they adapted to the changing environment. Issues of resilience in the face of dramatic environmental change, sustainable lifeways and practices, and dynamics of how and why people establish, maintain and, sometimes, strengthen economic and social connections to each other during times of social upheaval resonate today, and were important aspects of human behavior from at least the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture. There is much to be learned about the causes of global food and climate challenges today from this kind of detailed archaeological study of past societies, as well as about strategies for how people developed productive relationships with each other and the landscape to address such challenges.