Food production, community, and mortuary practice in the earliest Near Eastern Neolithic

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The transition from foraging to food production over 12,000 years ago in the Near East entailed a series of critical shifts in the economic and social practices of hunter-gathers that dramatically and irrevocably transformed human lifeways. The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) is a key period in human prehistory between ca. 11,600 to 10,200 years ago, when people still relied heavily on gathered plant foods and hunted game, yet began to experiment with both plant cultivation and more community-oriented social configurations. However, although it is clear that dramatic, co-occuring changes in subsistence and society took place during the PPNA, the precise mechanisms linking the shift from foraging to food production and community-based forms of social organization are poorly understood.Excavation at el-Hemmeh, an exceptionally well-preserved PPNA site located in the Wadi el-Hasa, Jordan, is already providing new insights into the changing role of the community in the earliest Neolithic societies, and enabling a more nuanced understanding of the widely diverse subsistence strategies used by the earliest food producers in creating community oriented social configurations. Excavations conducted from 2010-2012 have revealed at el-Hemmeh a unique communal mortuary structure (Structure 6), which contains multiple stone-lined cist features, each of which houses a human individual interred in a seated position. Previously, only simple graves, cut into house floors or extramural debris, and containing flexed burials were known for the southern Levantine PPNA. This project seeks to 1) complete excavation of Structure 6 and 2) complete excavations of deposits extramural to Structure 6 characterized by intentionally dumped hearth leavings, midden material, and construction debris. These focused steps form part of a project investigation of the ways in which communal mortuary practices were linked to subsistence activities and seasonality and intensity of occupation in the (re)structuring of social organization in the PPNA.