The result of twenty-five years of research with different tribal groups in the Arabian peninsula, this study focuses on ethnographic descriptions of Arab tribal societies in five regions of the peninsula, with comparative material from others. Having become aware of the depth in time of Arab tribal structures, the authors have developed a view of Arabic tribal discourse where 'tribe' is seen as essentially an identity that confers access to a social structure and its processes.

This study explores the relationship between nomadic communities in the Black Desert of north-eastern Jordan (c. 300 BC and 900 AD) and the landscapes they inhabited and extensively modified. This book focuses on the architectural features created in the landscape some 2000 years ago which were used and revisited on multiple occasions.

James A. Sauer was for many years the Director of the American Center of Oriental Research in Amman, Jordan, leading it to the preeminent place it now occupies as a research institution dedicated to the archaeology and history of Transjordan. This volume honors him, with more than 50 contributions from colleagues and friends. With this volume, the Harvard Semitic Museum inaugurates a new series entitled "Studies in the Archaeology and History of the Levant."

Over eighty contributions from leading researchers review 2.5 million years of environmental change and human cultural evolution in the Levant.

While there has always been a large public interest in ancient pictures painted or carved on stone, the archaeological study of rock art is in its infancy. But intensive amounts of research has revolutionized this field in the past decade. New methods of dating and analysis help to pinpoint the makers of these beautiful images, new interpretive models help us understand this art in relation to culture. Identification, conservation and management of rock art sites have become major issues in historical preservation worldwide. And the number of archaeologically attested sites has mushroomed. In this handbook, the leading researchers in the rock art area provide cogent, state-of-the-art summaries of the technical, interpretive, and regional advances in rock art research. The book offers a comprehensive, basic reference of current information on key topics over six continents for archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and rock art enthusiasts.

Once the world’s prairies, grasslands, steppes and tundra teemed with massive herds of game: gazelle, wild ass, bison, caribou and antelope. Humans seeking to hunt these large fast-moving herds devised a range of specialised traps that share many characteristics across all continents. Typically consisting of guiding walls or lines of stones leading to an enclosure or trap, game drives were designed for a mass killing. Construction of the game drive, organisation of the hunt and processing of the carcass often required group co-operation and in many cases game drives have been linked to seasonal gatherings of otherwise scattered groups, who may have used these occasions not only to hunt, but also for social, ritual and economic activities. The Gazelle’s Dream: Game Drives of the Old and New Worlds is the first comparative study of game drives, examining this mode of hunting across three continents and a broad range of periods. The book describes the hunting of bison in North America, reindeer in Scandinavia, antelope in Tibet and an extensive array of examples from the greater Middle East, from Egypt to Armenia. The Gazelle’s Dream will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of hunting and wildlife management.

The second half of the seventh millennium BC saw the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period is marked by significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices, and in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East with a view to placing them in a broader comparative perspective. The second concerns the social and ideological changes that took place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic that help to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as the consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. The third concerns changes in lifeways: subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources.

This Handbook offers an overview of the archaeology of the Levant. Written by leading scholars in the field, it integrates the treatment of the archaeology of the region within its larger cultural and social context and focuses chronologically on the Neolithic through to the Persian periods.

The natural arc of resource-rich land which forms the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of South-West Asia is regarded as the earliest centre of village-based farming in the world and has been the focus of much of our understanding of the transition from Epipalaeolithic hunter-gathers to Neolithic farmers. Beyond the Fertile Crescent is the first volume of the Azraq Project, a large-scale archaeological and palaeoenvironmental survey and excavation project undertaken between 1982 and 1989 in the ecologically diverse sub-region of the Azraq Basin in north-central Jordan: an area rich in Palaeolithic and Neolithic archaeology. Beginning with an overview to the Project aims, a detailed analysis of past and present environments and land use and the history of excavation in the Basin, Beyond the Fertile Crescent explores the geology, stratigraphy and dating of the Late Palaeolithic sites and provides a detailed description of the technology and typology of the lithic assemblages from the sites. These are then compared with those from the wider Levant, in order to explore possible links between technological traditions and social groups in order to understand the evidence for settlement strategies across the region.