Nafutian Female Shaman's Grave Loaded With "Goodies" - UPDATES

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Unearthed bones, found in a cave in the lower Galilee region of northern Israel, are seen in this undated
handout picture released by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem November 4, 2008.

An ancient grave unearthed in modern-day Israel containing 50 tortoise shells, a human foot and body
parts from numerous animals is likely one of the earliest known shaman burial sites, researchers said on
Monday.

REUTERS/
Naftali Hilger/
Hebrew University/Handout
(ISRAEL).

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                                                                    P A L E S T I N E






Palestine is a name which has been widely used since Roman times to refer to the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Other terms that have been used to refer to all or part of this area include Israel, "Greater Israel" (Hebrew
Eretz Yisrael), Retenu (Ancient Egyptian) Southern Syria, Greater Syria, Arabistan, Canaan, and the Holy Land.

In the broad geographical sense, Palestine refers to an area that includes contemporary Israel and the Palestinian territories, parts of Jordan, and parts of Lebanon and Syria.

In the narrow sense, it refers to the area within the boundaries of the former British Mandate of Palestine (1920-1948) west of the Jordan River.

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                                        Paleolithic and Neolithic periods (1 mya–5000 BCE)






Human remains found at El-'Ubeidiya, 2 miles (3 km) south of Lake Tiberias date back as early as 500,000
years ago.

The discovery of the Palestine Man in the Zuttiyeh Cave in Wadi Al-Amud near Safad in 1925 pro-
vided some clues to human development in the area.

In the caves of Shuqba in Ramallah and Wadi Khareitun in Bethlehem, stone, wood and animal bone
tools were found and attributed to the Natufian culture (c. 12800–10300 BCE).

Other remains from this era have been found at Tel Abu Hureura, Ein Mallaha, Beidha and Jericho.







KEBARANS



Kebarans was an archaeological culture that lived in the eastern Mediterranean area (c. 18,000 to 10,000 BC). They were a highly mobile nomadic people of hunters and gatherers in the Levant and Sinai areas who utilized microlithic tools.

The Kebaran were also characterized by small, geometric microliths, and were thought to lack the specialized grinders and pounders found in later Near Eastern cultures.

The Kebaran were thought to practice dispersal to upland environments in the summer, and aggregation in caves and rockshelters near lowland lakes in the winter. This diversity of environments may be the reason for the variety of tools found in the toolkits.

Being situated in the Terminal Pleistocene, the Kebaran is classified as an Epipalaeolithic society.

They are generally thought to have been ancestral to the later Natufian culture that occupied much of the same range.

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                                                N A F U T I A N   C U L T U R E






The Natufian culture (IPA: [nɑˌtuː.fi.ən]) existed in the Mediterranean region of the Levant.

It was a Mesolithic culture, but unusual in that it built stone architecture before the introduction of agriculture.

The Natufian communities are possibly the ancestors of the builders of the first Neolithic settlements
of the region, which may have been the earliest in the world. There is no evidence for the deliberate cultivation of cereals, but people at the time certainly made use of wild grasses. Animals hunted include the gazelles.

The culture is a successor of Kebaran culture.

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Dating



Radiocarbon dates of 14,500–11,500 BP place this culture just before the end of the Pleistocene.

The period is commonly split into two subperiods: Early Natufian (14,500–12,800 BP) and Late Natufian (12,800–11,500 BP).

The Late Natufian most likely occurred in tandem with the Younger Dryas.






Settlements



Settlements occur in the woodland belt where oak and pistachio were prevailing species.

The underbrush of this open woodland was grass with high frequencies of grain.

The high mountains of Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon, the steppe areas of the Negev desert in Israel and Sinai, and the Syro-Arabian desert in the east put up only small Natufian living areas due to both their lower carrying capacity and the company of other groups of foragers who denuded this large region.

The habitations of the Natufian are semi-subterranean, often with a dry-stone foundation.

The superstructure was probably made of brushwood.

No traces of mudbricks have been found that became common in the following Pre-Pottery Neolithic A, abbreviated PPN A.

The round houses have a diameter between 3 and 6 meters, they contain a central round or subrectangular fireplace.

In Ain Mallaha traces of postholes have been identified.

"Villages" can cover over 1,000 square meters. Smaller settlements have been interpreted by some researchers as camps.

Traces of rebuilding in almost all excavated settlements seem to point to a frequent relocation, indicating a temporary abandonment of the settlement.

Settlements have been estimated to house 100–150, but there are three categories: small, median,
and large, ranging from 15 m sq. to 1,000 m sq. of people. There are no definite indications of storage facilities.






Sedentism



A semi-sedentary life may have been made possible by abundant resources due to a favourable climate at the time, with a culture living from hunting, fishing and gathering, including the use of wild cereals.

Tools were available for making use of cereals:



flint-bladed sickles for harvesting, and

mortars,

grinding stones, and

storage pits.

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Lithics



The Natufian had a microlithic industry, made on short blades and bladelets.

The microburin-technique was used.

Geometric microliths include lunates, trapezes and triangles. There are backed blades as well.

A special type of retouch (Helwan) is characteristic for the early Natufian.

In the late Natufian, the Harif-point, a typical arrowhead made from a regular blade, became common
in the Negev. Some scholars use it to define a separate culture, the Harifian.

Sickle blades made on blades appear for the first time.

The characteristic sickle-gloss shows that they have been used to cut the silica-rich stems of cereals and form an indirect proof for incipient agriculture.

Shaft straighteners made of ground stone indicate the practice of archery.

There are heavy ground-stone bowl mortars as well.






Other finds



There was a rich bone industry, including harpoons and fish-hooks.

Stone and bone was worked into pendants and other ornaments.

There are a few human figurines made of limestone (El-Wad, Ain Mallaha, Ain Sakhri), but the
favourite subject of representative art seems to have been animals.

Ostrich-shell containers that have been found in the Negev.






Subsistence



The Natufian people lived by hunting and gathering.

The preservation of plant remains is poor because of the soil conditions, but wild cereals, legumes, almonds, acorns and pistachios may have been collected.

Animal bones show that gazelle (Gazella gazella and Gazella subgutturosa) were the main prey.

Additionally deer, wild cattle and wild boar were hunted in the steppe zone onagers and caprids
(Ibex) as well.

Water fowl and freshwater fish formed part of the diet in the Jordan River valley.

Animal bones from Salibiya I (12,300–10,800 BP) have been interpreted as evidence for communal
hunts with nets.

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Development of agriculture



According to one theory, it was a sudden change in climate, the Younger Dryas event, that inspired
the development of agriculture.

The Younger Dryas was a 1,000-year-long interruption in the higher temperatures prevailing since
the last ice age, which produced a sudden drought in the Levant. This would have endangered the
wild cereals, which could no longer compete with dryland scrub, but upon which the population had become dependent to sustain a relatively large sedentary population.

By artificially clearing scrub and planting seeds obtained from elsewhere, they began to practice agriculture.






Domesticated dog



It is at Natufian sites that the earliest archaeological evidence for the domestication of the dog is found.

At the Natufian site of Ein Mallaha in Israel, dated to 12 000 BP, the remains of an elderly human
and a four-to-five-month-old puppy were found buried together.

At another Natufian site at the cave of Hayonim, humans were found buried with two canids.






Burials



Burials are located in the settlements, commonly in pits in abandoned houses but also in caves in
Mount Carmel and the Judean Hills.

The pits were backfilled with settlement refuse, which sometimes makes the identification of grave-goods difficult.

Sometimes the graves were covered with limestone slabs.

The inhumations are stretched on their backs or flexed, there is no predominant orientation.

There are both single and multiple burials, especially in the early Natufian, and scattered human re-
mains in the settlements that point to disturbed earlier graves.

The rate of child mortality is rather high. About one-third of the dead between ages five and seven.

Skull removal was practiced in Hayonim cave, Nahal Oren and Ain Mallaha. Sometimes the skulls were decorated with shell beads (El-Wad).

Grave goods consist mainly of personal ornaments, like beads made of shell, teeth (red deer), bones
and stone. There are pendants, bracelets, necklaces, earrings and belt-ornaments as well.

In 2008, the grave of a Natufian 'priestess' was discovered (in most media reports referred to as a shaman or witch doctor). The burial contained complete shells of 50 tortoises, which are thought
to have been brought to the site and eaten during the funeral feast.

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Long distance exchange



At Ain Mallaha (in Israel), Anatolian obsidian and shellfish from the Nile-valley have been found.

The source of malachite-beads is still unknown.






Sites



Natufian sites include:


Tell Abu Hureyra, Mureybat, Yabrud III (Syria)
 
Hayonim Terrace, Ain Mallaha (Eynan), Beidha, Ein Gev, Hayonim Nahal Oren, Salibiya I (Israel)

Jericho (Israel)

Jiita III, Borj el-Barajné, Saaidé, Aamiq II (Lebanon)

El-Wad and Shuqba.






See also



Synoptic table of the principal old world prehistoric cultures

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Further reading



Balter, Michael (2005), The Goddess and the Bull, New York: Free Press, ISBN 0-7432-4360-9
 
Bar-Yosef, Ofer (1998), "The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Threshold to the Origins of Agriculture", Evolutionary Anthropology 6 (5): 159–177, doi:10.1002/(SICI)1520-6505(1998)6:5<159::AID-EVAN4>3.0.CO;2-7, http://www.columbia.edu/itc/anthropology/v1007/baryo.pdf 

Bar-Yosef, Ofer; Belfer-Cohen, Anna (1999), "Encoding information: unique Natufian objects from Hayonim Cave, Western Galilee, Israel", Antiquity 73: 402–409 

Bar-Yosef, Ofer (1992), Valla, Francois R., ed., The Natufian Culture in the Levant, Ann Arbor: International Monographs in Prehistory, ISBN 1879621037 

Campana, Douglas V.; Crabtree, Pam J. (1990), "Communal Hunting in the Natufian of the Southern Levant: The Social and Economic Implications", Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 3 (2): 223–243
 
Clutton-Brock, Juliet (1999), A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-63247-1 

Dubreuil, Laure (2004), "Long-term trends in Natufian subsistence: a use-wear analysis of ground stone tools", Journal of Archaeological Science 31 (11): 1613–1629, doi:10.1016/j.jas.2004.04.003
 
Munro, Natalie D. (August-October 2004), "Zooarchaeological measures of hunting pressure and occupation intensity in the Natufian: Implications for agricultural origins", Current Anthropology 45: S5, doi:10.1086/422084, http://www.anth.uconn.edu/faculty/munro/assets/Munro2004.pdf  S6-S33.
 
Simmons, Alan H. (2007), The Neolithic Revolution in the Near East: Transforming the Human Landscape, University of Arizona Press, ISBN 978-0-8165-6 






External links



http://ancientneareast.tripod.com/Natufian_Culture.html Epi-Palaeolithic (European Mesolithic) Natufian Culture of Israel (The History of the Ancient Near East)]

Cultural Complexity (Hierarchical Societies [Socio-Economic-Political Inequalities) in Mesopotamia: An Outline], http://unix.temple.edu/~phansell/65online/lect8.htm 




RETRIEVED FROM:


wikipedia.org



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