Lisa Maher

ABSTRACT Two Early Epipalaeolithic sites in Wadi Taiyiba, Northwestern Jordan, occur in quite different geological circumstances than similar sites in neighbouring Wadi Ziqlab. Both would have been close to ancient Lake Lisan but one is a shallow site on a slope near the edge of the Lisan shoreline while the other has deeper, stratifi ed deposits in front of a collapsed rockshelter a short distance upstream, overlooking a hot spring. Small excavations at both sites have shown that faunal remains were scarce at the former but fairly common at the latter, where mountain gazelle is the most abundant taxon, followed by boar, hare, wolf, fox, red deer, aurochs, and wild sheep and goat, and there were also some human remains from at least two individuals. Both sites have some ground-stones. Overall, the shallow site appears to have been a short-term camp focused on tool manufacture and gearing-up for hunting, while the deeper site has a denser and much more diverse assemblage, human remains, and evidence for many different activities, suggesting that it was a longer-term residential site that was re-used over many seasons. The sites contribute to our understanding of site diversity and settlement pattern in the relatively poorly known Early Epipalaeolithic.

Résumé : Deux sites de l'Épipaléolithique ancien, localisés dans le Wadi Taiyiba en Jordanie, se trouvent dans une situation géologique tout à fait différente de celle des sites comparables dans la vallée voisine, le Wadi Ziqlab. En effet, ces deux sites étaient probablement à proximité de l'ancien Lac Lisan : le premier est un site peu profond, sur une pente près de la rive du Lisan, tandis que le second comporte des dépôts stratifi és plus épais à l'avant d'un abri effondré, situé à courte distance en amont, dominant une source d'eau chaude. De courtes campagnes de fouilles dans ces deux sites ont montré que les restes fauniques étaient rares dans le premier, mais assez communs dans le second, où la gazelle de montagne est le taxon le plus abondant, suivi par le sanglier, le lièvre, le loup, le renard, le cerf, l'aurochs, le mouton et la chèvre sauvages. Des ossements humains provenant d'au moins deux individus ont également été découverts. Du matériel de mouture a été recueilli dans les deux sites. Le premier site semble correspondre globalement à une occupation de courte durée orientée vers la fabrication d'outils et les préparatifs pour la chasse, tandis que le second, qui présente un assemblage plus dense et beaucoup plus diversifi é, des restes humains et les traces de nombreuses activités, serait un site d'habitat de plus longue durée, réoccupé pendant plusieurs saisons. Ils contribuent à une meilleure connaissance de la diversité fonctionnelle des sites et des modèles d'occupation des territoires, qui sont assez mal connus pour le début de l'Eipaléolithique.

Grassridge rock shelter is located in the high elevation grassland foothills of the Stormberg Mountains in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. This places Grassridge at an important biogeoclimatic intersection between the Drakensberg Mountains, the South African coastal zone, and the interior arid lands of southern Africa. First excavated in 1979, the approximately 1.5 m stratigraphic sequence was divided into two major occupational components: a 50-70 cm thick Later Stone Age component dating between 7-6 ka and an underlying 50-80 cm thick Middle Stone Age component dated to 36 ka at the base. Here we present a reanalysis of the Grassridge stratigraphic sequence that combines new optically stimulated luminescence and radiocarbon age estimates with sedimentological and microbotanical analyses to evaluate site formation processes and the palaeoenvironmental context of human occupations. Results indicate a complex history of geogenic, anthropogenic, and biogenic inputs to the depositional sequence that are interspersed with pulsed human occupation from 43-28 ka, 13.5-11.6 ka, and 7.3-6.8 ka. Microbotanical remains indicate a cooler, drier grassland environment in MIS 3 that transitions to a warmer, moister grassland environment dominated by summer rainfall in the middle of MIS 1. The pulsed occupational sequence identified at Grassridge is characteristic of the Pleistocene and Holocene record across the greater high elevation grassland region of South Africa, which, based on comparison with other currently available evidence, seems linked to a complex system of forager mobility entwined with rapidly fluctuating palaeoenvironments across the last glacial to interglacial transition.