Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: The Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

Date:

Thursday, October 8, 2020, 12:00pm

Location:

online

a talk by Lisa Maher (UC Berkeley)

Abstract: Few cultural developments have been as well-studied as when people began living in villages and producing their own food. Yet in Southwest Asia, during the preceding ten thousand years of prehistory, Epipalaeolithic (23,000-11,500 cal BP) hunter-gatherers initiated and experienced dramatic cultural transformations that included building the earliest permanent houses and villages, storing food, developing a rich and diverse artistic repertoire, establishing wide-ranging social networks, intensifying plant use, domesticating animals, and creating strong ties to specific places in the landscape as evidenced by some of the world’s earliest aggregation sites and cemeteries. These hunter-gatherer groups had highly complex, knowledgeable and dynamic relationships with their local environments. Ongoing work in Jordan and Cyprus is revising our knowledge of these periods with evidence that markers of social complexity have an earlier foundation and challenging our long-held assumptions about how hunter-gatherers here perceived and constructed spaces and places, and the intersections between them. Investigation of human-environment interactions, the role of technological knowledge in creating social networks, the use of large-scale aggregation sites, and symbolic features of human burials, for example, all support a longer chronology of cultural development and continuity and in situ change among hunter-gatherers here that significantly predates the Neolithic. Indeed, it suggests that the features and practices often considered hallmarks of the Neolithic were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview.

Bio: Lisa Maher is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of the Eastern Mediterranean. Lisa received a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and, after completing a post-doctoral fellowship and research associate position at the University Cambridge, joined the Department of Anthropology at Berkeley in 2012. Here, Lisa teaches on topics of human evolution, geoarchaeology, the study of technology, prehistoric archaeology and human-environment interactions. Lisa runs the Geoarchaeology and Southwest Asia Prehistory Laboratory and is the Curator of Lithic Collections at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. Lisa currently directs excavations at the Late Pleistocene site of Kharaneh IV in Jordan and Cyprus. Lisa’s research focuses on hunter-gatherer societies with the aim of reconstructing human-environment interactions during the Late Pleistocene through the intersections of people, places and things. Lisa employs geoarchaeology and material culture analyses to explore novel relationships with plants and animals, sedentism and aggregation, architecture, complex site organization, social interaction networks, and elaborate mortuary practices to articulate the interactions of people and the landscapes they lived in.

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https://harvard.zoom.us/j/96959674787?pwd=cVdJY3FvMkNicU1ld0lYQk5xZDVPdz09