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Volume 64, nos. 1-2
March-June 2001
On
the cover:
The Levantine coast is one of the richest areas
in the world for evidence of the Middle Paleolithic. Just
one of the numerous sties scattered along thte coast is shown
here, Nahr Ibrahim, located north of Beirut immediately above
the modern shore line, as it was when, in the early 1970s,
Ralph Solecki led a team from Columbia University to excavate
it. Solecki]s project was following in the footsteps of one
of the pioneers of paleolithic archaeology in the Levant,
P. G. Zumoffen, who excavated at the cave in the early years
of the past century.
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4
Down
the Garden Path: How Plant and Animal Husbandry Came Together
in the Ancient Near East
by Naomi F. Miller
According to V. Gordon Childe, it was the first great ìrevolutionî‚that
advent of settled life that marks the Neolithic. Dr. Miller
provides a paleobotanical perspective on the process, illustrating
how crop choices and animal management schemes were intertwined
in creating new cultural structures for people to inhabit.
8
Dialogue:
The Gilat Woman: Female Iconography, Chalcolithic
Cult, and the End of Southern Levantine Prehistory
by Alexander H. Joffe, J. P. Dessel and Rachel S. Hallote
Sometimes a single artifact can be the stimulus for a deep
rethinking of a major socio-historic process. In this study,
the authors use the ìGilat Womanî as a springboard for an
innovative and provocative new appreciation of the economic
and socio-political structures that underlay the Levantine
Chalcolithic.
24
On Site Identifications Old and New:
The Example of Tell el-Hesi
by Jeffrey A. Blakely and Fred L. Horton, Jr.
Recent archaeological theorists of the ìInterpretive Schoolî
emphasize that extracting meaning from ancient finds is a
hermeneutic enterprise, a spiral of dialogue between observation
and understanding, rather than a traditional scientific enterprise.
The authors develop a complex argument, one that fruitfully
bridges text and strata, to consider each of the host of possible
identities that have been proposed for this key community
in the southern Levant.
38
The Middle Paleolithic: Early Modern
Humans and Neandertals in the Levant
by John J. Shea
The Levant has always been a crossroads and a zone of
dispute. This truism was as relevant in the deep past as it
is today. Dr. Shea insightfully reviews the extraordinarily
rich fossil and artifactual record that has been extracted
by multidisciplinary teams of researchers from the rockshelters,
caves and open sites of the western Near East. In so doing
he illustrates how paleontological, biological, geological,
ethnoarchaeological, and experimental archaeological theories
and techniques are necessary to piece together the complex
bio-behavioral relationships between Neanderthal and archaic
humans that set the stage for modernity.
72
On
the Origins of Azraq's Roman Wall
by Richard P. Watson and G. W. Burnett
The authors set out to unravel the mystery of who built
the ìRomanî wall in Jordanís Azraq wetlands preserve, when
they built it, and what its purpose was.
80
Satelite Images and the Representation
of Near Eastern Landscapes
by Nicholas Kouchoukos
New technology, new insights. The view from space provides
powerful tools to interpret the past. What were the physiographic
and environmental dimensions of the world experienced by the
peoples of the ancient Near East. Here Dr. Kouchoukos introduces
us to the power of sophisticated satellite imagery to allow
us to understand and imaginatively to enter the Mesopotamian
landscape.
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