In this major work Professor MacDonald chronicles an intensive and systematic archaeological survey of the southern flank of the Wadi el Hasa in West–Central Jordan. The survey resulted in the recovery of human evidence spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the Ottoman period (500,000 B.C.–A.D. 1918). The area is cut by a number of impressive and deep, south–to–north flowing wadis. As a region marginal for farming but stable for grazing, it would be the first to “empty out” and the last to “fill up” compared to more favourable regions. The methodology employed included a combination of purposive, predictive, and pedestrian transects. Lithics spanning the Lower Paleolithic to the end of the Early Bronze period (500,000–2000 B.C.) and ceramics covering the period from the Pottery Neolithic to the end of the Ottoman domination (4750 B.C.–A.D. 1918) were collected in the area. Sites surveyed included lithic and sherd scatters, camps, hamlets, villages, roads, milestones, fortresses, watchtowers, and mills. This research sheds new light on the settlement of the area, which now appears to have been most dense during the Middle Paleolithic, Iron II, Nabataean, and Byzantine periods.

Over eighty contributions from leading researchers review 2.5 million years of environmental change and human cultural evolution in the Levant.

Amid mounting concern over modern environmental degradation, archaeologists around the world are demonstrating the long history of such processes and the way they have shaped current landscapes. A growing body of evidence shows how humans have modified their environment for millennia, and contemporary problems cannot be understood without an adequate sense of this ecological past and the role of humans in it. The Wadi al-Hasa, a large canyon draining the Transjordan Plateau into the Dead Sea, has been the location of repeated cycles of settlement and land use for thousands of years. This book focuses on changing land-use patterns and their relationship to socio-political organization. Using a combination of archaeological and environmental data, Brett Hill examines the human ecology of agriculture and pastoralism from the beginnings of domestication through the rise and collapse of complex societies. Models of land use often consider political complexity as an important factor affecting mismanagement. Together with GIS erosion modeling and settlement pattern analysis, Hill evaluates the archaeological, historical, and environmental record spanning the Holocene to show how land use was affected by the rise of centralized authority. Yet populations in the Hasa maintained the ability to resist authority and return to a nomadic life when it became advantageous. This process emphasizes the power of local groups to pursue alternative strategies when their interests diverged from those of elites, creating a dynamic that reshapes the landscape each generation. Hill’s analysis contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of human ecology in the southern Levant, wherein current debates are complicated by research at different scales and by a lack of consensus on the importance of localized phenomena. It not only complements existing research but also seeks to refine models of processes in human ecology to demonstrate the effect of political organization on land mismanagement.

Offering the most comprehensive study of southern Jordan, this illuminating account presents detailed data from over a hundred archaeological sites stretching from the Lower Paleotlithic to the Chalcolithic periods. The author uses archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence to reconstruct synchronic and evolutionary aspects of the cultural ecology of the prehistoric inhabitants of southern Jordan. This study exemplifies that cultural historic and processual approaches are integral to examining prehistoric cultural ecology. Numerous artifact illustrations as well as tables and appendixes containing primary data are included.