Late Neolithic settlement patterns: Unravelling Wadi Ziqlab’s case

Late Neolithic settlement patterns: Unravelling Wadi Ziqlab’s case

amman — The research in Wadi Ziqlab, located in Northern Jordan, has focused on the distribution and character of small Late Neolithic sites dating to the 6th millennium BC. According to the archaeologists who studied the area, their hypothesis has been that the settlement system for much of this period may have combined isolated farmsteads with small villages and hamlets, organised in a dendritic (branching like a tree) pattern along watercourses.

“This contrasts with the large and medium-sized, aggregated villages, which appear on present evidence to have been typical of the Middle and Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and, perhaps, Yarmoukian periods,” noted the scholar Kevin Gibbs, from Barkley.

Scholars could not decide the link between these sites and whether they were contemporary sites or sites that were established as a result of the population movement.

“One of the major goals of this long-term investigation is to provide concrete archaeological evidence for the distributional patterns of Late Neolithic sites, the natures of their occupation, and social and economic relations among sites that were likely contemporary,” Gibbs underlined, adding that through their examination, the team aimed to provide better understanding of the possibility that “dispersed communities” during the Late Neolithic arose, persisted, and transformed