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<< Our Photo Pages >> Kharaneh IV - Ancient Village or Settlement in Jordan

Submitted by davidmorgan on Monday, 14 May 2012  Page Views: 6697

Multi-periodSite Name: Kharaneh IV Alternative Name: Azraq
Country: Jordan Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Amman
Latitude: 31.745686N  Longitude: 36.397476E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
3
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Kharaneh IV
Kharaneh IV submitted by Andy B : Kharaneh shells Credit: EFAP/L.Maher Site in Jordan (Vote or comment on this photo)
A Palaeolithic settlement in the Azraq Basin of eastern Jordan. Recent excavations have revealed insights into the lifestyles of 20,000-year-old hunter gatherers who lived here during the last Ice Age when the deserts of Jordan were in bloom, with rivers, streams, and seasonal lakes and ponds providing a rich environment for hunter-gatherers to settle in.

More information at the UCL web pages: Epipalaeolithic Hunter-Gatherers in the Jordanian Steppe

and also an overview of the Azraq Basin Project.

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Nearby Images from Flickr
Mushash Unknown?
Mushash Unknown?
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Mushash area
Mushash Unknown?
Mushash Unknown?

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 31.1km E 79° Azraq Desert Kite* Misc. Earthwork
 32.1km E 82° Qasr Uweinid* Stone Fort or Dun
 41.0km ENE 64° Azraq Geoglyph* Stone Circle
 41.0km ENE 76° Ayn Qasiyya Burials Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 48.0km NW 304° Ain Ghazal* Ancient Village or Settlement
 49.5km WSW 250° Khirbat Al-Mudayna* Ancient Village or Settlement
 49.5km WNW 298° Jordan Archaeological Museum* Museum
 49.5km WNW 298° Amman Citadel* Ancient Village or Settlement
 50.1km WNW 286° Tall al-Umayri* Ancient Village or Settlement
 50.5km WNW 297° Amman.* NOT SET
 52.8km WSW 239° Umm Al-Rasas* Ancient Village or Settlement
 56.9km ENE 67° Qasr Usaykhim* Stone Fort or Dun
 57.0km W 267° Madaba (Jordan)* Ancient Village or Settlement
 57.2km W 278° Hesbon* Burial Chamber or Dolmen
 57.2km W 267° Madaba Mosaic Map* Misc. Earthwork
 57.5km W 267° Adeihmeh* Burial Chamber or Dolmen
 64.1km W 269° Dolmens at Wadi Jadid* Burial Chamber or Dolmen
 64.5km WSW 245° Khirbet Ataruz Ancient Village or Settlement
 64.7km N 358° Umm el-Jimal* Ancient Village or Settlement
 66.6km W 261° Khajar Mansub* Standing Stone (Menhir)
 66.9km W 261° el-Mareighat* Burial Chamber or Dolmen
 66.9km W 261° South of Khajar Mansub Menhirs & Dolmens* Chambered Tomb
 68.1km W 278° Rawdah* Burial Chamber or Dolmen
 70.0km E 86° Jebel Qurma Petroglyphs* Rock Art
 72.6km NE 35° Qasr Deir Al-Kahf* Stone Fort or Dun
View more nearby sites and additional images

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"Kharaneh IV" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Twenty Thousand-Year-Old Huts at a Hunter-Gatherer Settlement in Eastern Jordan by Andy B on Monday, 14 May 2012
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Ten thousand years before Neolithic farmers settled in permanent villages, hunter-gatherer groups of the Epipalaeolithic period (c. 22–11,600 cal BP) inhabited much of southwest Asia. The latest Epipalaeolithic phase (Natufian) is well-known for the appearance of stone-built houses, complex site organization, a sedentary lifestyle and social complexity—precursors for a Neolithic way of life.

In contrast, pre-Natufian sites are much less well known and generally considered as campsites for small groups of seasonally-mobile hunter-gatherers. Work at the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic aggregation site of Kharaneh IV in eastern Jordan highlights that some of these earlier sites were large aggregation base camps not unlike those of the Natufian and contributes to ongoing debates on their duration of occupation.

Here we discuss the excavation of two 20,000-year-old hut structures at Kharaneh IV that pre-date the renowned stone houses of the Natufian. Exceptionally dense and extensive occupational deposits exhibit repeated habitation over prolonged periods, and contain structural remains associated with exotic and potentially symbolic caches of objects (shell, red ochre, and burnt horn cores) that indicate substantial settlement of the site pre-dating the Natufian and outside of the Natufian homeland as currently understood.

Full paper at PLoS One
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0031447
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From foraging to farming: the 10,000-year revolution by davidmorgan on Sunday, 01 April 2012
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Excavation of 19,000-year-old hunter-gatherer remains, including a vast camp site, is fuelling a reinterpretation of the greatest fundamental shift in human civilisation – the origins of agriculture.

The moment when the hunter-gatherers laid down their spears and began farming around 11,000 years ago is often interpreted as one of the most rapid and significant transitions in human history – the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.

By producing and storing food, Homo sapiens both mastered the natural world and took the first significant steps towards thousands of years of runaway technological development. The advent of specialist craftsmen, an increase in fertility and the construction of permanent architecture are just some of the profound changes that followed.

Of course, the transition to agriculture was far from rapid. The period around 14,500 years ago has been regarded as the point at which the first indications appear of cultural change associated with agriculture: the exploitation of wild grains and the construction of stone buildings. Farming is believed to have begun in what is known as the Fertile Crescent in the Levant region, which stretches from northern Egypt through Israel and Jordan to the shores of the Persian Gulf, and then occurred independently in other regions of the world at different times from 11,000 years ago.

Recent evidence, however, has suggested that the first stirrings of the revolution began even earlier, perhaps as far back as 19,000 years ago. Stimulating this reinterpretation of human prehistory are discoveries by the Epipalaeolithic Foragers in Azraq Project (EFAP), a group of archaeologists and bioarchaeologists working in the Jordanian desert comprising University of Cambridge’s Dr. Jay Stock, Dr. Lisa Maher (University of California, Berkeley) and Dr. Tobias Richter (University of Copenhagen).

Over the past four years, their research has uncovered dramatic evidence of changes in the behaviour of hunter-gatherers that casts new light on agriculture’s origins, as Dr. Stock described: “Our work suggests that these hunter-gatherer communities were starting to congregate in large numbers in specific places, build architecture and show more-complex ritual and symbolic burial practices – signs of a greater attachment to a location and a changing pattern of social complexity that imply they were on the trajectory toward agriculture.”

Fertile Crescent

Working at the fringes of the Fertile Crescent, at sites in the Azraq Basin and the marshlands of Jordan, the EFAP team is excavating the archaeological remains of the hunter-gatherers who occupied the region. Such sites have been under studied, said Dr Stock: “Because these early hunter-gatherers have been perceived as building only transient camp sites, they have been largely disregarded in explanations of the development of agriculture. Instead, excavations have focused on the later ‘Natufian’ period, beginning around 14,500 years ago, since this period more clearly shows cultural precursors of the transition to agriculture.”

Today, the Azraq Basin is a 12,000 sq km area of dusty, wind-blown desert, and a very challenging place to work. Temperatures can soar to 45°C, requiring the researchers to start field work at 5 am and finish by midday when the heat and winds become too strong to allow work to continue.

But when the first humans were leaving Africa, the open grasslands and lush marshlands of the Fertile Crescent teemed with gazelle, antelope and plant life. Given this region is situated at the crossroads between Africa and the rest of the world, it is perhaps unsurprising that it should be the site of regional agricultural innovation.

Few previous archaeological excavations have been carried out in this inhospitable terrain, most instead focusing on regions closer to the Mediterranean. With funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the researchers set out four

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Shelters date to Stone Age by bat400 on Saturday, 10 March 2012
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The remains of a couple of nearly 20,000-year-old huts, excavated in a Jordanian desert basin, add to evidence that hunter-gatherers built long-term dwellings 10,000 years before farming villages debuted in the Middle East.

These new discoveries come from a time of social transition, when mobile hunter-gatherers hunkered down for months at a time in spots that featured rivers, lakes and plentiful game, say archaeologist Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley and her colleagues. Discoveries in and around hut remnants at a Stone Age site called Kharaneh IV include hearths, animal bones and caches of pierced seashells and other apparently ritual items, Maher’s team reports in a paper published online February 15 in PLoS ONE.

Thanks to AndyB for this additional note. Source: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338646/title/Shelters_date_to_Stone_Age.
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Archaeologists discover Jordan’s earliest buildings by davidmorgan on Friday, 09 March 2012
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Some of the earliest evidence of prehistoric architecture has been discovered in the Jordanian desert, providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago.

Inside the huts, we found intentionally burnt piles of gazelle horn cores, clumps of red ochre pigment and a cache of hundreds of pierced marine shells."
—Dr Lisa Maher

Archaeologists working in eastern Jordan have announced the discovery of 20,000-year-old hut structures, the earliest yet found in the Kingdom. The finding suggests that the area was once intensively occupied and that the origins of architecture in the region date back twenty millennia, before the emergence of agriculture.

The research, published 15 February, 2012 in PLoS One by a joint British, Danish, American and Jordanian team, describes huts that hunter-gatherers used as long-term residences and suggests that many behaviours that have been associated with later cultures and communities, such as a growing attachment to a location and a far-reaching social network, existed up to 10,000 years earlier.

Excavations at the site of Kharaneh IV are providing archaeologists with a new perspective on how humans lived 20,000 years ago. Although the area is starkly dry and barren today, during the last Ice Age the deserts of Jordan were in bloom, with rivers, streams, and seasonal lakes and ponds providing a rich environment for hunter-gatherers to settle in.

“What we witness at the site of Kharaneh IV in the Jordanian desert is an enormous concentration of people in one place,” explained Dr Jay Stock from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the article.

“People lived here for considerable periods of time when these huts were built. They exchanged objects with other groups in the region and even buried their dead at the site. These activities precede the settlements associated with the emergence of agriculture, which replaced hunting and gathering later on. At Kharaneh IV we have been able to document similar behaviour a full 10,000 years before agriculture appears on the scene.”

The archaeologists, who were funded by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, spent three seasons excavating at the large open-air site covering two hectares. They recovered hundreds of thousands of stone tools, animal bones and other finds from Kharaneh IV, which today appears as little more than a mound 3 m high rising above the desert landscape.

Based on the size and density of the site, the researchers had long suspected that Kharaneh IV was frequented by large numbers of people for long periods of time; these latest findings now confirm their theory. “It may not look very impressive to the untrained eye, but it is one of the densest and largest Palaeolithic open-air sites in the region,” said Dr Lisa Maher, from the University of California, Berkeley, who spearheads the excavations.

“The stone tools and animal bone vastly exceed the amounts recovered from most other sites of this time period in southwest Asia.” In addition, the team also recovered rarer items, such as shell beads, bones with regularly incised lines and a fragment of limestone with geometric carved patterns.

So far, the team has fully excavated two huts; but there may be several more hidden beneath the desert’s sands. “They’re not large by any means. They measure about 2–3 m in maximum length and were dug into the ground. The walls and roof were made of brush wood, which then burnt and collapsed leaving dark coloured marks,” described Dr Tobias Richter from the University of Copenhagen and one of the project’s co-directors.

Radiocarbon dating suggests that the hut is between 19,300 and 18,600 years old. Although a team of archaeologists working at Ohalo II on the shore of the Sea of Galilee (Israel) in 1989 found the region’s oldest hut structures, whic

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