Pseudo-house and Pseudo-wall : A Unique Funerary Practice of the Early Pastoral Nomads in the Near East.

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The purpose of this research project was to explore the origin and development of the early pastoral nomadism in the Near East in light of the pseudo-settlement hypothesis, a likely explanation for the formation process of enigmatic settlement sites in southern Levant that lack any clear evidence for practical habitation. Chosen for this purpose was the al-Jafr basin in southern Jordan.The excavations at Qa 'Abu Tulayha West in 2001-2002 and a series of investigations in the northwestern part of the al-Jafr basin in 2003 revealed that burial installations of early pastoral nomads in this basin from the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age always contain a pseudo-house or its deteriorated form, pusedo-wall as annexed facilities. They also confirmed that : 1)pseudo-house cairns, which characterize the burial customs in the Late Neolithic, changed into pseudo-wall cairns in the Chalcolithic, which in turn were transformed into K-lines(i.e., a linear combination of pseudo-wall burial cairns) and pseudo-wall burial enclosures in the Early Bronze Age ; 2) this unique burial practice derived probably from the under-floor or, more precisely, under-facade burials that were popular among PPNB agro-pastoral populations to the west.This line of evidence highlights that the early pastoral nomadism in the southern Levant was established through the spread of sedentary, agro-pastoralists towards the steppe and desert, not through the import of domesticated sheep and goat by hunter-gatherers who were wandering in the arid peripheries.