PUBLISHED 2013. Please visit the publication's webpage
The Natufian period of the Levant (ca.13,000-10,300 BP) witnessed the birth of crucial settlement and subsistence practices in the Levant that laid the foundation for the Neolithic village farming way of life. Specifically, the period is transitional between the mobile hunter-gatherer communities of the earlier Epipalaeolithic (20,000 - 13,000 years BP) and the sedentary agrarian societies of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (10,300 - 9,200 years BP) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (9,200 - 8,000 years BP) periods.
The discovery of the larger, complex Natufian open sites such as 'Ain Mallaha and Jericho in the 1950s lent strong impetus to the study of the advent of human sedentism in the Middle East. Yet since then, Wadi Hammeh 27 is only the third example of the large Natufian base-camp to be in the Mediterranean zone of the southern Levant, and is the only one of its type in Jordan. The site, dating to ca. 12,000 B.P., is thus important for detailing the characteristics of the agrarian transition, and to this end it an extraordinarily rich and well-preserved one. Broad excavation of the uppermost occupation phase has revealed large oval limestone dwellings, which enclose an array of stone features such as hearths, postholes and pavements and boulder clusters. Beneath this lie two further superimposed architectural phases, the whole underlain by a layer with human burials.
The site is notable for a series of exquisitely preserved artefact clusters, such as a unique bone double-sickle cached with other sets of stone tools, bone beads and colored pebbles; and several sets of carefully stacked basalts and mortars. It has yielded a rich and varied repertoire of rock-art ranging from large rock slabs incorporated into the walls of a dwelling, to small incised limestone plaques. It has a varied assemblage of 275 basalt artefacts, and over 550 bone artefacts which include the largest known collection of bone sickles known from any Natufian site. Other materials include red and yellow ochre, marine Dentalium shells imported for bead manufacture; and a taxonomically diverse fauna. Wadi Hammeh 27 also yielded the first published archaeobotanical remains recovered from a southern Levantine Natufian site.
The excavations at Wadi Hammeh 27 were conducted under the direction of the lead researcher on this publication project, Dr. Phillip C. Edwards, between 1983 and 1990, under the aegis of the University of Sydney Pella project.