People and Birds in the Southern Levant: Ecological, Economic and Symbolic Relationships during the Early Neolithic

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People throughout the world and throughout history have had special relationships with birds. Birds, together with their nests and eggs, have been sources of food; their plumage, flight and song have inspired artists, writers and musicians; scientists have been motivated by birds to gain fundamental insights about ecology and evolution; politicians, religious leaders and warlords have adopted birds as their symbols, whether to intimidate or reassure. This complex web of people-bird relationships is especially striking in the southern Levant, the area now primarily covered by Israel, Palestine and Jordan, as evident from the representation of birds within the region's art and literature. Within the Old Testament, for instance, eagles, doves, storks, ravens and other birds appear as messengers, omens, metaphors, and as sources of food. The pervasiveness of birds in Levantine culture is perhaps not surprising because of the abundance and diversity of bird life within this region, although this is increasingly threatened by the loss of habitats and environmental change. It is a reasonable proposition that varying arrays of ecological, economic, social and symbolic relationships between people and birds were also found in prehistoric cultures within the Levant, and that these provided the foundations of those in the historical periods and the present day. This project will explore this notion by seeking to reconstruct people-bird relationships within the earliest sedentary societies of the Levant, those of the early Neolithic, c. 12,000-10,000 years ago. These were communities of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A culture. Although primarily living by hunting and gathering, these communities were increasingly cultivating wild plants and managing herds of wild goats, activities that ultimately led to domestication and farming economies. As such, these early Neolithic communities have a particularly important role to play in not only Levantine but world prehistory in general. While drawing on data from numerous archaeological sites, the project will focus on the bird bones acquired from recent excavations at the settlements of WF16 and El-Hemmeh. These are the largest collections of bird bones ever recovered from Neolithic sites in the region. Both WF16 and El Hemmeh have evidence for complex social and symbolic activities in addition to those of a domestic nature; the bird bones come from meticulously documented contexts including burials, rubbish pits, hearths and occupation debris. The bird bones will be catalogued and identified to species using the comparative collection of bird bones at the Natural History Museum located at Tring, UK. This will also identify which body parts are present and how the carcasses had been treated as a means to infer whether the birds had been used for food, for display, within ritual or even kept as live birds at the site. Interpretations of the data will draw on four additional sources of information: contextual information, such as whether the bird bones came from rubbish pits or burials; previously published bird-bone data from other Neolithic sites in the region; avian ecology, so we will know about the appearance and habits of the birds identified, such as whether they were migratory or had impressive plumage; and historical and ethnographic evidence for people-bird relationships within the region. To synthesis and interpret this range of information the project will bring together an inter-disciplinary team composed of Neolithic archaeologists, an archaeo-zoologist, a cultural historian and an ornithologist. It will take approximately two years to complete, with researchers based in the UK, Germany and Jordan. The project team will work closely with JordanBirdWatch, an NGO committed to bird conservation, which will draw on the research outcomes to support its work in raising awareness about the importance of birds to the well-being of environments and society.