The Levantini Podcast
The Levantini Podcast is a show about the ancient Near East with a focus on biblical archaeology, Judaism and Islam.
The Levantini Podcast
The Natufian Culture
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In this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Professor Emeritus Mina Weinstein-Evron of the University of Haifa who is the former head of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology. Her research focuses on the middle Paleolithic hunter-gather culture that lived in the Levant known as the Natufian Culture.
Welcome to the Forincy Podcast. I'm your host, Alex Soren. Forensic is a podcast about Near Eastern history, language, and culture and is brought to you by forency.us, the premier language learning website for intermediate to advanced learners of Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian. On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Professor Emeritus Mina Weinsin-Evron of the University of Haifa, who's the former head of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology. Her research focuses on the Middle Paleolithic hunter-gatherer culture that lived in the Levant, known as the Natufian culture. Had a great time speaking with her, and I hope you enjoyed the show. Okay, we're alive. Thanks for joining me today, Professor. So before we got started, we were talking a little bit about the coronavirus. And from what I understand, you just finished your most recent excavation in March, right before it the worst of it hit, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, we knew about it already, but because we were in the caves, we figured out it's the best place to be, maybe it's the safest.
SPEAKER_00Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01So we just went on with some volunteers from Greece also.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01But still they managed to get home safely.
SPEAKER_00So today we're going to be talking about the Natufian culture. And before we get into that, I just wanted to know how you found your way into this field, why you took an interest in excavating this era of history.
SPEAKER_01It's all by chance. I started as a social worker, by the way. And only then I started to study archaeology because I figured out I don't want to dig into the soul of people you know all the time. And you know, Israelis are very attached to the country and to the land. So I wanted to study geography, but somehow I didn't manage with the classes, so I started job, prehistory in archaeology because it's there's a lot of geology, geography, landscape. So I found myself in this realm of archaeology, which is more related to I think archaeological sciences, natural sciences, less than to history. Today maybe I would have changed because I like history more, but then I like nature more.
SPEAKER_00And who were the Neutufians? What was the Neutufian culture?
SPEAKER_01It's a cool culture, if you want. It's we call it epipaleolithic, which means a kind of the epilogue to the Paleolithic, something between the Paleolithic ways of life and the Neolithic or the beginning of the agricultural revolution. I call them happy Paleolithic. I think they were quite cool. It was a real revolution for what was there before, because in every realm of life there are some innovations, some things that are changing. Even if there are roots in cultures that were there before, it's the the extent of things, the size of things, the magnitude of things is totally different. So for us it's a revolution, or for me it's a revolution. Even though it may have had roots before, they didn't come from outer space. And that's the first sedentary people or semi-sedentary people. I have been spoiled to be connected, to be able to do for the last four years or so in Atel Wad, which is one of the first Natufian sites ever excavated. And actually is the site of the excavation of which uh Dorothy Gerald, who dug it in the 30s, realized it's really a new culture, and she named it Natufian after the site where it was first discovered. Okay, the Badi Natuf.
SPEAKER_00And so how far back are we talking? This is like 12,000 to 15,000 years ago?
SPEAKER_01Between 15, roughly 15,000 is to 11,500 or so. So it's many thousands of years. For us, you know, it's the death of the precinct, it seems like yesterday and it seems very quick, but still it's like 4,000 years or so, which is a long period of time for change, for development, but this people really achieved a lot.
SPEAKER_00And the Natufian culture, where are the primary settlements located?
SPEAKER_01We have what we call the core area of the Natufia, where we have the major uh base camps or hamlets. Most of them are in the Mediterranean vegetation zone, the Levant. There's some in the rift valley, and recently they found some additional sites in Jordan, some in Syria, mainly from the later part of this culture. But if you look at the vegetation map of the Middle East, you see that the Mediterranean region goes quite further south, we see Jordan and then in Transjordan, and then in Sea Jordan. So in Jordan it goes quite southwards, almost to Elan. So it's still, even if you find sites there, it's still within the Mediterranean, what we call core area of Lemotrif. And because at Elwad, for instance, we have the oldest dates, at least to date. Maybe we can even unvisage if you want to speculate that it started even on Mount Carmel, at least the Mount Carmel and Dalini area.
SPEAKER_00So Mount Carmel's up near Haifa. And then one of the main excavations we'll be talking about today is the one you mentioned, the Wadi Almurada caves, where it's a series of caves of Natufian settlement that's been excavated for over 90 plus years, right?
SPEAKER_0190 years, right?
SPEAKER_00What did that area look like during that time, 12,000 to 15,000 years ago? I mean, how different was it from what it looks like today?
SPEAKER_01I think it wasn't very different. It was still a Mediterranean climate, maybe a little bit more humid. The main change was because of the glacial ages. It was just post-glacial, but still the sea was much further away than today, so we would have had the coastal when it was like 10 kilometers wider than today. So caves like El Watken, which is an Atofian site we're talking about, now it's around 45 meters above sea level, it would have been 200 meters above sea level, with a lot more marshes and ridges and coastal areas to exploit.
SPEAKER_00And in terms of the wildlife that was around at that time, what kind of animals did these people hunt? What was there then that's not there now?
SPEAKER_01Only all rocks, maybe, but they are very rare. Otherwise, it's deers. Of course, we don't have them now, but we had them like 100 years ago. So it's deers, gazelles, and otherwise they were hunting everything that was moving. I mean, they were eating it's like a Thai or Chinese restaurant. Maybe it's not nice to make no Chinese restaurant, but they were eating turtles and birds and fish and mollets and scrammets and including all kinds of snakes and legless lizards. Everything that was moving was eaten. So it's what we call the broad spectrum. Um with revolution, if you want to utilization of the landscape. Everything was exploited. I guess because they were sedentary, so they had to exploit everything around them.
SPEAKER_00Right. And on that point about them being sedentary, so they kind of occupy an interesting place in history, right? Because they were hunter-gatherers, but they were sedentary. You mentioned they were kind of on the cusp of the agricultural revolution. I'd like if you can talk about their lifestyle, so who they were in at that point in history, right before the agricultural revolution took place.
SPEAKER_01You're right. It's important that they were sedentary and not agriculturalists yet. They were what we call intensive hunter-gatherers because everything was done more intensely. Again, maybe because they were sedentary, or maybe they became sedentary because they had to. It's, you know, it's the egg and the chicken. We don't know what came first. But certainly, once they were sedentary, they were settled in a place they needed to exploit their area or the environment better than before. Subsistence changes a lot. There was a change or development in hunting strategies. Again, this wide spectrum of things they were hunting. It's not only hunting, it's the gathering. When you say hunters, it's always hunters and gatherers. They were gathering a lot of vegetable material. We don't find much, it's not well preserved. But when we find it, you we see all kinds of woods they were using, cereals. At El Wad, they also found the first Faba bean, the wild precursor or ancestor, if you want, of the Fababin. Not at El Wad, at other sites of the Natovin, they found evidence for maybe early bread. So you can already have visited the pita bread, not with the homus, maybe with the fabric. At another site on Mount Camel, they think they found evidence for maybe beer, you know, very ancient low-alcool beer, but still something better than they had before. Actually, because El Wat was dug first, there were all kinds of problems or phenomena that people could afterwards research when they dug other sites afresh. Like what I mean is we have a lot of cut nuts and mortars at Elwad that are exposed since 1935. So there's no way we can study anything there. But when the same features are exposed in Alkersan, like in Rakefad, but then in Adah, they can now look for residue and kind of all kinds of the materials that were preserved there. And of course, like this reconstruct much more than we can do today. Had we excavated it now.
SPEAKER_00Can you describe for us what the series of caves looks like and that what kind of monument it appears to be when you're talking about the Wadi ad Mugara caves near Mount Carmel? When you come upon it, what does it look like and what are the features of it?
SPEAKER_01I think it's a landmark. You're right. I don't know if it was called Vadi al Muha then or Nachal Me'a Wat, or the Valley of the Caves, but certainly it was a landmark for ancient people as well. It's one cliff, but it hosts four very famous and important prehistoric caves. Each one is a site by itself, but I think for me it was all one site, because the distance between Taboon Cave, if you heard about it, the audience heard about it, and El Wat Cave is 100 meters. So I think it was one huge site, and people just exploited different holes or parts of it according to what they needed, their needs. Taboon cave collapsed very early, so most of the sequence is now at El Wat Cave. And the cave was used for middle Paleolithic times, like at least 50,000, 60,000 years ago, until yesterday, until the archaeologists came, if you want to chase the shepherds that gave me the caves. So there's a very, very long sequence of occupation in the outcoming cave. And actually, the site became a World Heritage Site of UNESCO in 2012. And one of the outstanding universal values is this long occupation of culture, because it's very rare to find like at least half a million years of women occupation at one site.
SPEAKER_00And it also had Neanderthal occupation as well, there, right? Yeah, yeah. What do you think drew people to this particular site for that long time?
SPEAKER_01Well, you know, caves are like tails because people come, you are right, they're drawn to this the place because it's a landmark, because it's a very advantageous point in the landscape. You can look around, you can see who is approaching. And you have a command over the landscape. People came again and again. That's why you have layers upon layers. It's in a way caves are like the tales of prehistory. That's why people are coming again and again. What's very characteristic of prehistoric caves, especially in Mount Carmel, but not only is what John Henry called ecotunnels, which means they're in the meeting point between different biotopes. So it's in our case, it's the mountain, it's the rivers or what is, it's the coastal plain. In each habitat, you have different plants, different animals, so they can utilize everything. For me, it's like the people living in the villas in Haifa. You know, they're living in the caves, but actually they are commanding, they're coastal playing people because that's where they get most of their hunting, most of the game and other things. In the mountain, they have, I think they hunt the deers in the coastal playing the gazelles and some of the fish, and uh, if you want other things. We have very good flint on Mount Carmen. In Israel we have two good things, flint and salt, a lot very useful today, maybe. And if we talk later about the maybe long distance trade and exchange, I think one of the things they could have exchanged was salt, even though we never find any traces of it. But because they live near the Mediterranean, it could have been something they could have traded for. Something else coming from further east.
SPEAKER_00Where do we think that these people came from?
SPEAKER_01We don't know actually, because most of the DNA studies that we have now show that they have relations with the people who came after them. They are very rare skeletons from the periods before, and DNA is not either preserved or found yet. But we have what we call earlier or epipaleolithic, what we call kabaran and geometrical cultures, and we have the sites of these people on Mount Carmen, the slopes of Mount Carmen or the Mount Carmen coastal plain. So there should have been some connection between these groups. People live there before, and these are definitely.
SPEAKER_00And how widespread was their interactions with other peoples?
SPEAKER_01So again, until we have DNA, even though in some sites they start to find DNA, we base these interactions on tools or artifacts that we can kind of follow the origins of. One thing was basalt tools, for instance. We kind of dated the basalts of which the tools were made, and realized based on the dating and the spread of natural basalt, none of the basalt items came from Carmel itself. Now we know that they came from near the Sea of Galilee area. So there were probably sites there that were making uh basalt tools, and they were trading it again for I don't know what from the Mediterranean area. There are green stone beads, for instance, in Aden at El Wat. And the green stone is from again, east of the Jordan Valley. There are all kinds of themes in art, all kinds of engravings that are very similar in different sites, so maybe it also shows some connection.
SPEAKER_00Do they go farther than what we would call Israel today?
SPEAKER_01I mean, do they go into Europe or to Africa or no Europe, Africa, no, but to east of the Jordan Valley, probably, even though you cannot tell if they went there or if there was a kind of diffusion of artifacts. You don't have to bring the artifact, you can bring it to your neighbors.
SPEAKER_00What does that tell us about the complexity of their culture?
SPEAKER_01Again, meeting places where now we know probably also centered around all kinds of ceremonies, maybe, I don't know, death ceremonies or seasonal ceremonies related either to the seasons or certain events. We know it because we kind of look at all kinds of ethnographic data, but also there are certain sites where clearly people didn't live but just made or performed all kinds of ceremonies there. And these sites are usually cemeteries or burial sites as well. So in Mount Carmel, there are two in the Aninatufini, it's Kebar Cave, where there was only a cemetery, but it was dug in the 30s, and we don't have enough details. But in Rakeha cave, it was dug lately. It's clear that they were burying there, they had all kinds of ceremonies there involving food. And the beer that I mentioned before also came from this site. So apparently there was some kind of a ritual related to this cave, the same in Khilazon cave in the Galilee. And it's interesting, I think in the early Natufani on Mount Carmel, we had two early Natufian sites, and Wat Cave, which was a habitation site with some burials as well, and a Kebark cave, which was only a cemetery site, and in the late Natufian, again, one site, Mahalomen, which was a habitation site also with burials, and a kefir site, which was the ceremonial site if you.
SPEAKER_00And they didn't live in the caves, correct?
SPEAKER_01Well, at El Wadakus, we know that they utilized the cave at least until 35 meters from the entrance. It was quite dark there, I know, because I was digging there. But in the outer chamber of the cave, we found the, oh actually the carrot and the one who dug before. I can talk about him also. The one who did the trial excavation into the wall. There was some activity area there. Yeah, there were very large mortars, there was the heart, there were some burials, there was uh wall. So we don't know much about it because again it was dug in 1928. Nothing remained of it, but we can and visit different activity areas. But most of the activity was done on the terrace, and that's where we're digging out actually. The village was on the terrace.
SPEAKER_00Right. So there was a village that that was in the area of the cave outside of the cave, but the cave was probably more used for cultural or other activities.
SPEAKER_01We don't know because in the cave Gerald found like ten burials, but there were also these huge mortars and things, so they can be for the ceremony again, like in Rakefut. They even had the idea of when you have a ceremony and you pound, you have this pounding noise or pounding sound that can give some atmosphere to the ceremony. The thing is with the other excavation, it's hard to really know what happened there because you know documentation was different, not because they were digging badly, or each time we develop or improve the methodologies and dig in more detail now. And also another thing is the dating, because the dating is usually with the standard deviation which gives you, I don't know, sometimes 300 or 400 years limit or range. You don't know exactly what was exactly before what was contemporaneous, if they were burying and doing other things in other parts of the site. It's very hard to see if things were contemporaneous on how the site was really, you know, planned.
SPEAKER_00How did they bury their dead?
SPEAKER_01So they buried them as far as we can know from our excavations now, and also from Garrett, mostly under the floors. At Elwad. I'll talk about El Rad because we have 150 almost burials, so it's easy for me to relate to. Garrett found in the cave uh extended burials, like the ten we told you about, but otherwise, most of them were flexed or semi-flexed. That is the flex and put in a crounced position, if you want. And sometimes the knees even uh touch the forehead, and in that case, people say that maybe they were tied or put in a sack or something. Many of them were decorated, or at least some of the group burials that we have, group burials and individual burials. Most of the oldest ones were group burials, many of them decorated with the beads and pendants and shells of the dentalium. Actually, we were talking about the trade exchange. If you find dentalium shells from the Mediterranean in the rift valley sites, it means it's another indication of trade or long distance travel of specimens. In some of the birds, they found already broken mortars because it's we are on the threshold of agriculture. People were using more often all kinds of groundstones and mortars and sickle blades and with sickle halves and show intensive usage of probably cereals. And when they were broken, some of them were put in graves. I mean, other sides suggest that they even broke them on purple. So you have the dead person and the breaking of implements put into the grave. Again, maybe part of some kind of a ritual related to death.
SPEAKER_00What are some of the hypotheses about that, about their burial rituals in terms of what that meant for them to be buried with tools and decorations? Does that indicate some kind of belief in an afterlife or yes?
SPEAKER_01Well, either afterlife or to relate them to a certain class. Maybe class is too much to say, but people say that based again on these decorated bears versus the bears that they're not decorated, that maybe this is a kind of a sign for some kind of a social hierarchy or complexity. So maybe the ones that were decorated higher up in the rank. Because you have sometimes in a group, you have a group and then one of them is decorated. So it kind of relates to the whole group.
SPEAKER_00And I have to imagine if there was already trade at that time, like we were talking about, and trade over pretty significant distances for that time, these items that people were buried with, and especially the jewelry that they were wearing on, I think they were like wrapped around their heads and stuff. I mean, there had to be some value to those objects.
SPEAKER_01So surely, yeah. Because it was hard to make, even though some of the beads were made locally, some of the shells were brought from further away, some, as I told you, the green stones came from further away. So it must have been a dear object that you want, an expensive object. And it's kind of a way to show off. Because they went, of course, they were born when the people were alive. You didn't find them on the skeletons, but of course they were part of what they wore when they were alive. So the way to show off either you belong to a certain group or that you are better off or whatever, certain group. Each side, in a way, had their signs, if you want. Like if you found a person from El Wad, you would know it was El Wadian, probably, because they had different decorations. At El Wad, they had these special beads made of gazelle soapplones that they were making in the site. And they are very, very in other sites. At El Wad, for instance, there are different kinds of decorations, like with parallel lines that they use like on the sickle hafts and on all kinds of figurines. In other places, they always have these same parallel lines, which are different from the same from other engravings in other sites. And there is in the ocre, I think it's nice because we did some studies on of the occurrence, and it appears that the terwad, I mean, if they put rouge on the cheeks, the women or men, I don't know if Elwad would be red cheeked, and the people from Haionim would have more purple cheeks, and the ones from Ennan would have rose cheeks. So maybe even with the color they had some difference because they had all these regional encounters, again, between the tribes of the groups. So maybe it was also important to show where they came from. And also they had to meet because if you want to have a vibrant population, you need to meet with other groups. It's the I mean, the fact that we are here shows that they were a viable population, at least some of them. So they need to have all these meetings here.
SPEAKER_00When you're looking at the skeletal remains that you have, and I don't know how much there is, what can we tell about how they died? I mean, did they suffer from disease? Is there evidence of warfare or violence?
SPEAKER_01Not very much warfare. Even though at Cabal they found one, it's not nice to say specimen individual with some flints stuck into the vertebrae, the back vertebrae. What or most of the actual what we say died healthy? I mean, we could have died of diarrhea in two days. I mean it's you don't need to have something, you know. Healthy means you didn't have a disease that was long enough to leave mark on the skeleton. So they were rather healthy. It's a lot with dug some late nativity skeletons. And in some of them you could find pathologies if you want, but they are related to the ways of life. Like we could tell they were walking barefoot on very hard terrain or they were using the pens because you can see on the bones, like when you do sports, you can see the bones are more the muscles are more developed than you have the signs of the bones. But it's more related to ways of life. It's not like the Neolithic where they started to have malaria and calassemia and other things. They were more, as far as we know, less pathologists, they can water place.
SPEAKER_00What are some of the theories about why you don't see evidence of, I guess, widespread warfare or violence when you're looking at the skeletons?
SPEAKER_01Maybe there wasn't, I don't know. Maybe there wasn't all maybe we don't see all of them actually. In the Natushians, we have like, I think already 500, 600 burials in the Levant, which is much more than the Middle Paleolithic times, where altogether we have 100 or so. But still it's not the whole population. So maybe, I don't know, it's just an idea. Maybe the people who kind of suffered from all kinds of violence just died somewhere else. Not all of them were brought into the site. Right. And not the whole site was dug, we don't have the whole information. But altogether there's less violence, even in the Middle Periodic times.
SPEAKER_00But they did have weapons, and that's something I wanted to ask you about. What kind of tools or weapons do we find that they were producing there? And how does it differ from what came before it?
SPEAKER_01So they had mostly projectiles. Uh, there were complex projectiles, but maybe what we call lunats. It's up to the form of these microlites in this period. We did some experiments. One of our students, Halchevi, did some experiments of shooting at dead goats with the projectiles constructed from microlites from the pre-Natufan periods and from the Natufens and abounded based on all kinds of impact structures we found. They were um composed differently, they were lighter in the Natufen and probably more efficient. So part of the again, the change of subsistence is related to changing hunting gear, if you want, and to use of snaring and all kinds of different trapping that uh than before. So there were more sophisticated hunters, really. And also maybe group hunting, you know, if you you need to round some gazelle herds or something. They also, in this part of the intensification, is hunting younger zelves because normally if you want to keep the herd, you don't hunt younger zelves, but here they started to do this as well. They need to know the ways of life of the herds if they wanted to keep them for the next generation or the next year. So I think they knew about nature, both animals and plants much more we than we do, of course.
SPEAKER_00Do we think that they developed this enhanced hunting technology and weapons themselves, or is this more evidence that it might have been imported from someplace else?
SPEAKER_01It could have been developed, but I don't see anywhere else. It could have come from. Unlike what we found in the early Middle Paleolithic, where we think it's related more to Africa here. I don't see any culture that can be, if you want, the origin of this thing too thinning in North Antarctica always.
SPEAKER_00Right. When we're talking about the structures that they lived in, can you explain to us what that looked like?
SPEAKER_01Again, it's the first stone architecture, if you want, in the world, far from the Roman architecture, of course, but still it's the first. So it's usually little huts and the foundations there were dug actually, they were a little bit subterrained, if you want, a little bit. They were dug in the soil, and then uh foundations were made of stone. And uh we don't know about the upper parts, but um mostly probably brushes or other things, at least based on the phytolites we found at the site. And some of the installations were smaller, like for some activities, some were larger, maybe a communal thing, we don't know. But there are all kinds of different structures and halls and silos, and it's not like before that everything looks the same. You have different parts of the site, they monitored different uses in a way. Even though the garbage was all the same, you know, everywhere they just kind of the leftovers were left largely on site.
SPEAKER_00Right. And when you're looking at the structures that they lived in, is there any rhyme or reason to the patterns that you're seeing and were the structures close together or far away?
SPEAKER_01Rather close together, but again, we haven't dug the whole site, so we don't know. Gerard, the things that were found in the outer chamber of the caves, they are gone. It was the trial excavation made by Charles Lambert. I'll talk about it in a minute, if you let me.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_01So we don't know much. It's only from the archive or I did. Gerard found some walls. She called them terrace walls. It's a kind of a way, if you want, to level the site, because the site was like in terraces, like again, a nice village facing the river and the coastal clean, a beautiful place to play. She found some pavements as well, but otherwise we know nothing of the way the structures are made. Our New Dig now is about one and a half meters below this upper, if you want, the terrace of El Water. And there we have this large convenient wall, about nine meters in diameter, and within it all kinds of little substructures, if you want, all kinds of installations and things. So it's a kind of a special regiment that is typical to and wide. Maybe reminiscence of a little bit of Enan in the west valley, but we don't know how the whole site looked. Because we have only like 17 square meters of the site, which must have been at least two thousand square meters.
SPEAKER_00How big was a standard Natufian village?
SPEAKER_01So again, around two dunums, or two square kilometers. Square kilometers, good, it's too much. Two thousand square meters or so. And how many space camps.
SPEAKER_00How many people?
SPEAKER_01Fifty probably, or it could be between fifty and one hundred, they think. We don't know again. Again, we don't know because all signs of intensive habitation, because we were using the site again and again. When we have a wall, we have series of floors abooting to it. Now we're digging the terrace. I think the twelve floors are booting to one room, but still we don't know how much they inhabited funny. So when you want to say to know how many people live there, you need to also know how much exactly, and it's very hard to know.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_01But a normal hunter-gatherer group would be like twenty-five people, like an extended family. So here they must have been between fifty to one hundred. So but we don't exactly know.
SPEAKER_00How do the tufian sites differ from other sites in the world at that time?
SPEAKER_01They're very different than Magdalenian sites or others that are still very hunter-gatherers. And the same time as we have the Magdalenian culture, for instance, in Europe, there are actually sites that they are elaborated, they have all these huts in many places, like in Pennsylvania, like in Germany and others. But the culture is much more known, of course, for the art, all the cave art and all the little figurines and things they found at the site. But there is no sign of them being sedentary and no signs of them being like intensive hunter gatherers or do anything with cereal processing, anything with mortars, anything with signal blades and using signals like they did here for probably the cereal. They are still Paleolithic. We are already on the verge of agriculture that, as you know, developed in this area in the Middle East, the nearest. So they are proper hunter gatherers, very elaborated one. And I would like to have nice drawings in our case. It's not that I'm downplaying the importance of the site, but it's another kind of a process of it.
SPEAKER_00What are some of the theories of why those other civilizations or hunter-gatherer groups, what are some of the theories of why they were behind the Neufians?
SPEAKER_01Why? I don't know why they were behind. Maybe they if we related to climate change, it was always better in our part of the world. And they were legged up. So, you know, if there was a glacial period, it was much longer then. But agriculture altogether developed in the Elephant or if you want the crescent, you know, in southeastern Turkey or so. And from there it kind of infiltrated all parts of Europe, maybe some people say also the Middle East. So it was one epicenter, if you want it, for the culture, but you had domesticated plants and animals, where we find also the wild ancestors of these plants and animals, like of the legion or the chickpeas and the fabric.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01So from there it kind of spread.
SPEAKER_00It seems like, like you were saying, the climate did play a big part in their development because these things probably were growing naturally, and from that they developed the tools to in this area we had when we have all this wild barley and wild wheat, etc.
SPEAKER_01In Ohalo side, which is upper Paleolithic, you know, near the Sea of Galilee that Daninadal was excavating, because it's submerged kind of all the vegetable material is preserved, and they have tons of wild barley, and it's 23,000 years ago. So it was here all the time. You just need to find all these cereals, wild cereals that are adequate and suitable for the rest.
SPEAKER_00Right. Where do these people stand in relation to the people that existed around the site of Gubekli Tepe in modern day Turkey?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So that site is a later part of the UNATUF, if you want, or the passage to operate the Neolithic period, so on. So there is no relation. Also, DNA studies suggest that each area developed their own populations, like our Neolithic people developed from our local populations, and the the ones in Turkey developed from former populations that were. But anyway, we're talking about the late end of the Natufians. So it cannot explain why it started.
SPEAKER_00Right. And from what I understand, the Natufians, especially the the sites that you've excavated at Wadi Almurada, it's not one long process of sedentization, right? From what I understand, they were sedentary, but then there was a period where they kind of became more hunter-gatherer-ish again, correct?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, the late Natufi, there's some deterioration. You see it in a less architecture if you want it to, but it's not real. They didn't go back. In evolution, I don't think you can go back. I decided to see some deterioration, but like the Seitzra Kevin, the ones I mentioned before with the fisting and things, and the one in Philosophia, all late Natufi. And as I told you, at the late Natufian, there is some deterioration, but Nahalon, which is only five kilometers north of what to cover, if you want, and you have a green village there. So on Mount Carmel, there was always one major site. What happened in the desert? It's different. Mount Carmel was always a good place to be and always very fluent. Right.
SPEAKER_00No, that's a good point you bring up that I wanted to ask you about too, because correct me if I'm wrong, but Jericho was a Natufian site originally as well, right?
SPEAKER_01It started in a Natufian way. Yeah, right. Originally, right?
SPEAKER_00The climate there would have been very different from Mount Carmel. How did that Natufian site differ from the ones near Mount Carmel?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I don't think they know much about the Natufian of Jericho because it's the very bottom of the site. It's the same with the one. I come back soon to it's the same with the one. We don't know how the Natufian site started. In the archived study I did, there are some signs that it started with the very flimsy, you know, all kinds of little installations and things, but we don't know if it's everything because normally you start from the top and in the area at the bottom until you reach Bedbrook. You don't know how it's really started. But there are sites like Vadihame 27 in New Betcheon, which if you want is quite similar to Jericho, and it had a very nice village of the animal to find you know, very similar to anyone.
SPEAKER_00So it seems like the culture was fairly uniform then at these different sites.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Each site was a bit different. I mean, when you look at not the flintums, but other other signs you could say it's I think it's a little bit like the mammoths of the different capes in Europe. When you see a mammoth from Rufignac, you recognize it's from Rufignac and not from Fond de Gong. They look different, but they're all Magdalenian. So it's the same with the Natufin. You see Natufin decoration or Natufin burial or Natufin brownstone implements, you know, the Natufin, even if they are different. It's one big culture with all kinds of local styles, if you want, modifications.
SPEAKER_00You mentioned that with like the parallel lines that the one settlement decorating. Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. With all the work that's been done excavating these sites, and then like you mentioned, the site's been excavated for well over 90 years, these are ongoing excavations. What are you all researching and excavating at this point? What's left to do for the future?
SPEAKER_01First of all, one of the again, if you go back to this being a ward headers, like one of the criteria of the outstanding universal value, if you want, was the history of research. Because the site has been dug for the last 90 years, even though they're not continuously, but over time, each new methodology of archaeology was tried there. You know, it's you can follow the history of prehistoric research with the history of design, which is a kind of exciting. You need to be more modest because you know you're not the first one. It was Gerald who started to dig design. Even now we have a lot of criticism of the way it was done before, because you know, people then, at the very early stage of research, you had to dig a lot to see what was going on, to establish the stratigraphy, to the course of events. The insights she had, the famous summary of the Natufian culture in 1957, it could have been written today. Of course, with a lot of modifications about all the additional studies, you have new datings, new information, but still the vision of the Natufian culture is much the same. And now we give more and more details. We add color, I think, we had a lot of smell we didn't have before because of all this, like the beer again, not that we are drunk, we are digging. We can date better, we can have all kinds of pathology, we're deciphered and other things. So there's still more to do. It's surprising how each time we get more data, which it's we never know actually what will happen. That's what's so nice in a dig. You have, you know, when you apply for a grant, you know exactly what you're going to do, but you never know what you're going to find, which is a kind of it's a nice game. But what I had also a very nice experience when I did the archive studies I mentioned, because I found the field notes of the guy who did the trial excavation before Garrett. His name was Charles Lambert. He was sent to the trial excavation of the cave because the British wanted to build the port in Haifa and they had to lengthen the wave breaker or whatever of the port, and they were looking for a quarry, and of course they found this beautiful landmark I was talking about. They wanted to quarry it. But the head of the Department of Antiquities then said, okay, but first they want to do a trial excavation. He sent this guy, Charles London, to do it. And I think this is my idea. He found a lot of Latufian stuff and the walls I were talking before, and some of the burials. But the main thing he found was this first art object ever found in Israel or in the Levant, which was a sickle heart formed or engraved or in the form of some kind of kalf or whatever, some kind of an animal. And it was then published as even in the London Illustrated Evening News, saying that once in Israel or in Palestine then, the civilization has evolved as the Magdalenian of France, if you're talking of Europe. So this art object, I think, kind of saved the world, the caves. I don't think anybody would be excited, you know, seeing some gazelle bones or some flint tooth. But this made quite an impression and they stopped the quarry that started a little bit and moved it to another place. That's where Gerald was asked to come and dig the caves. And it's nice, I remember vividly because when this Charles Lambert, who wasn't even an archaeologist, found his second half, he sent a telegram. He went to Atlitz, which was in Orange, unfazed the caves. And he sent a telegram to Jerusalem saying found carl animal head, Paleolithic, great importance. I think this is what became. And when I look at what we did later, or I did later I look at all the data that were in these field notes. Normally, when you read the archive material, you don't have new data, but here there was new data, and we kind of joined them with what we know from Gerard and what we know from Audik, and altogether you get a more comprehensive view of the site. And it's really exciting also to learn about the lives of these early archaeologists who are part of the same experience we are having now.
SPEAKER_00Right. And then before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask a little more about some of the art that has been found there. You mentioned an animal carving in stone of a calf. What else do we see?
SPEAKER_01It was in bone, actually. And also there you had these parallel lines. In the caves, I found what they call little bobulinas. They are kind of little figurines made of natural flints, but they were engraved near the neck usually. So they kind of collected the flints that reminded them of the form of a human being. And they kind of played with it a little bit. In other sites, many of the seagull halves were decorated, which means they had more than a practical value to them. People were using sickle halves because they had the sickle blades with the special shin that is formed after you kind of cut the silicon plants in the cereals. But many of them were also decorated. So there is the relationship between the practical realms, if you want, at the beginning of agriculture, and the more ritual symbolic realms are not very. There is no clear cut, it's altogether. As I mentioned before, you have these mortars also buried with humans. Other forms of art or short are decorative objects. So we have all these beads, some of them are twin beads, all kinds of beautiful pundits made of bone and polished. So some, I think Annabelle Francoin and her colleagues looked at some of the beads or the pendulum from Elohard, the ones that were dug by Gerda, and they have different colors caused by different exposure to fires. They suggested it may be even intentional. So you can have different colors on it. What do you wear, you know, when you have this? Oh, that's interesting. It's another thing. And as we talked also, the ochre may be part of some kind of decoration.
SPEAKER_00When did this civilization or culture I don't want to say die out, but when did they kind of blend into the surrounding populations? When did they disappear?
SPEAKER_01It's around 10,500 or so. Some people there were some good that became Neolithic, you know, so it's like a natural development from the sedentary way of life, the cultivation probably, all the intensive utilization of the environment. And the effect that you need to create to produce your new food if you want to keep living at the same place with the same amount of population, etc. So maybe they slid into the Neolithic with the domestication of plants and animals and later trees, whatever. And the more complex, of course, of villages and religious lives, and then you start doing up with these temples and other places in Neolithic and Calculation.
SPEAKER_00Right. And the rest is history, I guess.
SPEAKER_01The rest is history, yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_00Right. So thanks so much for taking the time out of your weekend or the beginning of your week, I guess, to speak with me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for us, it's the beginning of the week. Right.
SPEAKER_00And wish you the best of luck.
SPEAKER_01We are right because we were before, you know.
SPEAKER_00Right. And stay safe also.
SPEAKER_01Ah, you too, really. Next time we talk, I hope it will be in happier times.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, hope so too. So take care, and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.