15,000-year-old tools shed light on community relations in ancient Israel
15,000-year-old pestles were found, offering insights on how communities began to develop a close connection to their territory.
(photo credit: EL-WAD ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPEDITION)
Fifty-four basalt pestles dating back 15,000 years, uncovered in a
cave in the Carmel area offer insights into the relations between the
earliest communities who transitioned to a sedentary lifestyle and how
they started to develop a close connection to their territory, research
by Israeli and German scholars has shown.
The University of Haifa
and University of Mainz project successfully located the source of the
raw materials used by ancient Natufians to manufacture tools to process
their food. It reveals that most of it came from different areas around
Lake Kinneret, between 60 and 120 km. from the el-Wad Terrace site where
they were found.
“Since
we did not find evidence of basalt processing at the Carmel site, we
assumed that the ancient Natufian hunter-gatherers of the Carmel would
travel to the Kinneret, among other things, to bring the processed
basalt vessels,” said University of Haifa archaeologist Prof. Danny
Rosenberg, one of the authors of the paper recently published in the
academic journal Scientific Reports.
Basalt
is an especially hard type of rock that requires sophisticated
knowledge and technology to avoid breaking it when it is cut.
Natufian
communities lived in the area in the late Epipaleolithic period,
11,700-15,000 years ago, during the transition between the Paleolithic
and the Neolithic eras, which was reflected in their lifestyle. The
Natufians were still hunter-gatherers who were not able to produce their
food but still lived in semi-permanent small settlements.
The trips of el-Wad Natufians to the Sea of Galilee could have happened according to two theories.
It
is possible that only expert stonecutters would travel to the area,
possibly taking the opportunity to exchange other objects along the way,
although in light of the many and relatively distant sources of raw
material researchers believe it is not very likely.
Another theory states that the whole community would go, maybe
as part of their seasonal movements around the region. The
stone-cutting technology was preserved and transmitted among the members
of the community.
The
researchers were not surprised to find out that these populations would
journey so far. Previous studies had shown that they traveled even
greater distances and maintained some form of commercial relations with
regions that were even further away.
A view of Nahal Meʽarot Caves. (Credit: El-Wad Archaeological Expedition)However, what especially intrigued them was that there were areas
where the Carmel Natufians could have found the basalt much closer to
home. They reason that those long trips might have been forced by the
necessity to avoid rival communities.
“The
advent of a sedentary way of life dovetailed with the emergence of an
early sense of possession,” the researchers wrote. “As groups became
more closely attached to a certain place and invested in their immediate
surroundings, they probably began cultivating prefatory claims of
ownership.
“In
this vein, the Natufian culture is also notable for introducing a new
sort of geopolitics: the emergence of socio-territorial entities, a
landscape of more-or-less distinct spatial units attached to organic
groups, probably separated from one another by unclaimed ‘buffer
zones,’” they added. “As one group claims an area and its resources, it
also denies it to others, setting into motion a dialectic of alienation
and suspicion.”
According to Rosenberg, it is possible that the basalt sources closer to the Carmel were
under the control of rival groups, which caused the el-Wad Natufians to
travel as far as the Kinneret, an area that was almost uninhabited.
“The
transition of some of the Natufian communities to permanent settlements
and early forms of agriculture must also have led to the development of
their territorial feelings and strengthened the connection between them
and the environment of the sites in which they lived,” he said.
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