Osamu Maeda

This study examines the continuity and change in harvesting practices between the Late Pre‐Pottery Neolithic B (LPPNB) and the Early Pottery Neolithic at Qminas, north‐western Levant, through a traceological analysis of flint sickles. By combining qualitative traceological analysis with quantitative functional approaches, we demonstrate that sickle blades were used for low‐cut harvesting of ripe domesticated cereals, reflecting a fully established farming system. The production and use of sickles remained highly standardized throughout the site’s occupation, with sustained investment in their manufacture. The specialized production of sickle blades for cereal harvesting at Qminas highlights the crucial role of lithic tools in food production and their broader significance in the transition to farming in Southwest Asia. The overall technical stability observed across the LPPNB and Pottery Neolithic levels indicates that the consolidation of agricultural systems in the north‐western Levant was not a sudden rupture but rather a continuous process embedded within the broader trajectory of Neolithization. This evidence suggests that the transition in this region was characterized by an evolutionary shift within the same cultural framework, leading to the consolidation of a fully developed agropastoral lifestyle.

Access full-text academic articles: J-STAGE is an online platform for Japanese academic journals.

It has been 40 years since the excavations of Qminas in northwest Syria were carried out in 1981 by a Japanese-Syrian team, who uncovered a Neolithic settlement with an occupational sequence from the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B to the Pottery Neolithic periods. However, during a long time after the excavations, the results of the investigation have only been briefly reported, and the artifacts recovered during the excavations have never been studied in detail. This paper provides basic information on the 1981 excavations and the material artifacts recovered from this site. It is mainly based on the re-investigation of the archive of the original excavations and the artifact studies conducted during the excavation, as well as some additional studies of the artifacts currently stored at the University of Tsukuba. It can be argued that archaeological evidence acquired from Qminas demonstrates a tradition of local material culture that was shared in northwest Syria through the transition from the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B to the Pottery Neolithic.

The idea of holding a conference to discuss how we can explore what affects our approaches to, and understanding of, lithic artefacts and their analysis emerged from a hands-on workshop entitled Northern Knap-in in November 2014. In that workshop we wanted to explore how prehistoric people in the north of England, which is perceived by many as being a (lithic)resource-poor region, might have adapted to the lack of good quality flint and chert for tool manufacture and so we experimented with the working of non-flint raw materials. Many things emerged from that day including how the experimental knapping of materials other than flint allowed us to think outside the conventional box, and how communal knapping and grinding demonstrated some of the different ways that people interacted and adapted to each other’s rhythm when making artefacts. We were also struck (excuse the pun) by how much non-lithic specialists contributed to the questions we raise in lithic analysis. This brought home to us the importance of finding other, sometimes non- conventional, ways in which we can engage with the past. This eventually led to the Immersed in Lithics Conference in February 2016.

This paper investigates the heat treatment of flint practiced at the Neolithic site of Hasankeyf Höyük in southeast Turkey. It does not involve petrographic or geochemical analysis to identify the physical and chemical evidence of heat treatment but aims to understand cultural aspects of the use of ancient lithic technology, using heat treatment as a case study. Heat treatment is a lithic production technique in which siliceous rocks are heated by controlled fire in order to improve their flaking quality. Archaeological evidence of heat treatment is seen all over the world, and numerous studies have contributed to the better understanding of this technique. However, what is particularly intriguing in the case of Hasankeyf Höyük is that there are many flint artefacts which were apparently overheated and unusable due to the frequent failure in achieving successful heat treatment. On the other hand, experimental studies using an electrical furnace and open fire show that once the appropriate heating time and temperature are learnt, the heat treatment of local flint at Hasankeyf Höyük is an easy process and does not require high technical skill. It is therefore suggested that heat treatment at this site was exercised along non-economic principles by people who were not very keen on improving technological efficiency, even when they could have easily done so.

This study presents a provenance analysis of the Neolithic obsidian assemblages from the early to mid‐sixth millennium bc settlement at Göytepe, Azerbaijan. The study is unique in that (1) it involves a complete, non‐selected obsidian assemblage (901 artefacts) from one particular area of the site; (2) the material is derived from a well‐stratified sequence of 10 securely radiocarbon‐dated architectural levels; and (3) the use of an extraordinarily wide range of sources (more than 20) was identified by provenance analysis using energy‐dispersive X‐ray fluorescence. The results reveal a previously unknown diachronic change in obsidian use in the region, suggesting the occurrence of significant socioeconomic changes during the Late Neolithic of the southern Caucasus.

Lithic analysis and the transition to the Neolithic in the Upper Tigris Valley: recent excavations at Hasankeyf Höyük - Volume 92 Issue 361 - Osamu Maeda

Domestication is the process by which plants or animals evolved to fit a human-managed environment, and it is marked by innovations in plant morphology and anatomy that are in turn correlated with new human behaviours and technologies for harvesting, storage and field preparation. Archaeobotanical evidence has revealed that domestication was a protracted process taking thousands of plant generations. Within this protracted process there were changes in the selection pressures for domestication traits as well as variation across a geographic mosaic of wild and cultivated populations. Quantitative data allow us to estimate the changing selection coefficients for the evolution of non-shattering (domestic-type seed dispersal) in Asian rice ( Oryza sativa L.), barley ( Hordeum vulgare L.), emmer wheat ( Triticum dicoccon (Shrank) Schübl.) and einkorn wheat ( Triticum monococcum L.). These data indicate that selection coefficients tended to be low, but also that there were inflection points at which selection increased considerably. For rice, selection coefficients of the order of 0.001 prior to 5500 BC shifted to greater than 0.003 between 5000 and 4500 BC, before falling again as the domestication process ended 4000–3500 BC. In barley and the two wheats selection was strongest between 8500 and 7500 BC. The slow start of domestication may indicate that initial selection began in the Pleistocene glacial era. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Process and pattern in innovations from cells to societies’.