Gazelle Hunting Strategies in the Early Ahmarian: Close-Range Visuospatial Characteristics of Site Locations Indicate Spatially Focused Hunting Strategies on Gazella sp. During the Early Ahmarian

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Abstract
Visual conditions around Palaeolithic sites determine how the landscape was perceived by prehistoric hunter-gatherers. By placing the site in different landscapes, different visual foci were encoded in the locational characteristics of the different places. For the Early Ahmarian sites in the Levant, it can be shown that visual characteristics differ significantly with the combination of large ungulate prey exploited at the respective location. A Higuchi viewshed approach was combined with total viewsheds of the study area to introduce a human scale into the viewshed modelling. While diverse prey locations in the Mediterranean biome provide an overview over the landscape, specialised prey locations in the steppe biomes of the Irano-Turanian and Saharo-Arabian biome have their focus on the immediate vicinity of the sites. This correlates with the placement of sites in the context of highly humid environments which can be best exemplified with the site of Al-Ansab 1 in the escarpments of the Jordanian Rift Valley. Here, the environmental conditions acted as a magnet, focusing gazelles on the migration between different environments.
Funding Information
  • Universität zu Köln

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