Don’t Abhor Your Neighbor for He is a Pastoralist: The GIS-based Modeling of the Past Human-Environment Interactions and Landscape Changes in the Wadi el-Hasa, west-central Jordan (original) (raw)
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Journal of Archaeological Sciences, 2011
Assessing the impact of prehistoric sites on their local environment is difficult to accomplish with standard archaeological methods. Simulation modeling offers a solution to this issue, but it is first necessary to delimit a site catchment, or “zone of impact”, around archaeological sites in which to carry out human–environment interaction modeling. To that end, I have developed a new method for GIS-based catchment reconstruction and distilled it into a custom module (r.catchment) for GRASS GIS, which calculates catchments of a given area based on anisotropic travel costs from a point of origin. One method of applying this new module in exploratory catchment modeling is discussed using the pastoral economy of the Late Neolithic period in Wadi Ziqlâb, Northern Jordan as a test case. A model of Late Neolithic herding economy and ecology is constructed, which combines data from archaeology, phytogeography, range science, agronomy, and ethnohistory. Four sizes of pastoral catchments are then derived using r.catchment, and the herd ecology model is used to estimate the stocking-rate (carrying capacity) of mixed goat and sheep herds for each catchment. The human populations these herd numbers could support (between 3 and 630 people in the Wadi) are then compared with human population estimates derived from household architectural analyses (between 18 and 54 people in the Wadi) to determine the most probable catchment configurations. The results indicate that the most probable zone of impact around the known Late Neolithic sites in Wadi Ziqlâb was somewhere between 9 and 20 square kilometers, delineated by 3 and 4.5 km pasture radii respectively.
Towards a Reconstruction of Land Use Potential: Case Studies from the Western Desert of Egypt.
African Landscapes. Interdisciplinary Approaches, 2009
This chapter is situated in the field among archaeology, geomorphology, and ecology. Two case studies from different east-Saharan landscape units classify and analyse archaeological, geoscientific, and remote-sensing data of Early and Mid-Holocene archaeological sites. The section combines the approaches of landscape ecology and landscape archaeology. The aim is a parameterisation of the research areas with respect to structural and ecological features. The data were used within a Geographical Information System (GIS), a hydromodelling, and statistical software. The analysis allows an indication of the observed landscape parameters that are essential for the location of the sites within each time slice. Therefore, the study broadens the understanding of the man–environment relationships.With the help of this integral and autochthonous landscape inspection it is possible to reconstruct the past potential of the utilisation of such arid landscapes. Such an approach also helps in locating new archaeological sites within landscape units. At the end a first suggestion for a model of interacting key variables and the general landscape development of the Western Desert during the Early and Mid-Holocene is presented.
Levant, 2014
Across the Levant a strong dichotomy exists between lowland valley landscapes, often characterized as cultural and economic hubs, and regions of perceived economic, social, and cultural marginality (e.g. uplands, steppes, and deserts). Despite the growing number of surveys and excavations being carried out within these regions there have been few attempts to collate this work into a broader landscape study. This study will demonstrate the potential of using new technologies, alongside traditional survey techniques and the collation of existing literature, to understand how past populations may have exploited regions we now consider inhospitable, bleak, or at least not worth exploiting. Focusing on a broad geographical area, stretching across the north of Jordan, we will consider how human groups interacted with, within and beyond, their landscapes during the 4th millennium BC and the role these regions may have played within wider developments taking place across the entire Levant during the Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age.
Evolving landscape and environment in Jordan
Jordan, an Archeological Reader, 2008
Th e following contribution examines aspects of the physiography of Jordan as a basis for understanding processes and events that infl uence population distribution and occupational environment, both at present and in the past. When attempting to examine landscape alone, it becomes clear that in any archaeological context, landscape cannot be removed from the broader physical setting and must be considered alongside hydrological and climatic factors. Of special signifi cance is the role of (palaeo)hydrology, since the availability of water is the one essential element without which ongoing occupation cannot exist, and which strongly infl uences the nature of that occupation, where it does exist. Th is chpater provides a description of the physiography of Jordan based largely on the physiographic provinces initially erected by Bender (1968, 1974, 1975), but with some modifi cations. For each province it examines and compares events from a small selection of well-documented sites, where the nature of long-term occupation refl ects strongly on the physical evolution of Jordan through time. In dealing with palaeoenvironmental reconstructions there are many diffi culties in comparing the palaeohydrology and palaeoclimatology from diff erent areas, and this is especially the case using archaeological evidence. One reason for this is that Palaeolithic man did not live in an average geographic setting, but instead chose those areas where he could best survive. Attempts at landscape and environmental reconstruction for a region based largely on geoarchaeological data are thus strongly biased by the favourable hydrological settings of the long-term occupation sites from which the most complete records come.
This research on the early metal ages of the Wadi el-Hasa focuses on the settlement systems and attempts to explain how social, economic and political adjustments helped tribal groups survive under natural (i.e., climatic) and anthropogenic (i.e., land degradation, erosion) stress factors. The shifting of subsistence base from agropastoral to pastoral their reflections in site and population densities, diversity of site types, levels of internal complexity and levels of social organization via the presence of large settlements, like villages, which acted as economic and administrative centers emerge as risk reduction mechanisms. The cycles of abandonment and resettlement are evaluated within the concept of social reorganization and such changes are assessed as parts of economic revitalization attempts. The social changes that emerge from such shifts are evaluated from the perspective of the scale-free networks model and tested through statistical methods, such as ANOVA, for spatial and temporal patterns while patterns of land use and the impacts of changing climate and anthropogenic activities are evaluated with GIS. Following the dimorphic society and heterarchic social organization concepts, the discussion emphasizes that tribal groups adjust population density, range and intensity of activities in marginal landscapes, like the Hasa, in order to prevent environmental degradation. These patterns may change once these marginal landscapes are integrated to more complex social organizations. Although this takes place in the Hasa during the Iron Age, the research results imply that environmental degradation did not take place possibly due to the continuation of extensive subsistence patterns, along with the emergence of the long-distance caravan trade as a major economic incentive.