Toolkit Contents
Before the end of the last ice age, a hunter-gatherer left a bag of tools near the wall of a roundhouse residence, where archaeologists have now found the collection 14,000 years later.
The tool set -- one of the most complete and well preserved of its kind -- provides an intriguing glimpse of the daily life of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer.
Edwards outlines the finds, attributed to the Natufian culture from a site called Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan, in the latest issue of Antiquity.
He believes the tools were enclosed in a hide or wickerwork bag with a strap that would have been worn over the shoulder. Such bags rarely had compartments, so the owner probably protected valuable items by wrapping them in rolls of bark or leather before placing them at the bottom of the bag.
The sickle, constructed out of two carefully grooved horn pieces, was fitted with color-matched tan and grey bladelets. It would have been a marvel of form and function for its day and is the only tool of its kind ever linked to the Natufian people.
The rest of the items were designed to immobilize and then kill game such as aurochs, red deer, hares, storks, partridges, owls, tortoises and the major source of meat -- gazelles.
"A lone hunter or a group of hunters might wait for gazelles to cross their path while waiting behind a low 'hide' made of twigs and brush," Edwards explained.
"They might have worked on making bone beads to wile away the time. Then a hunter could get off a shot while the animals were off their guard. A first shot might wound, but not kill, and then a hunter or a group of them will track the wounded animal."
Excavations at Wadi Hammeh 27, near Pella in Jordan
Wadi Hammeh 27 is one of the richest sites of the Natufian culture (ca. 12/800-10.300 b.p. (uncalibrated) in the Levant, an important juncture in the transition to early farming and village life. The site is located near ancient Pella in the East Jordan Valley, and was excavated under the auspices of the University of Sydney in the 1980s. It contains several superimposed stratigraphic phases featuring oval limestone huts, with human burials underlying, mingled with, and overlying these.
The huts are provided with a variety of small stone facilities such as hearths, postholes and pavements. They are also crammed with massive amounts of artefacts and refuse - hundreds of thousands of items including rock-art (ranging from large-scale incised slabs to small plaques); artefact types in flint, limestone, siltstone, basalt, animal bone, ochre and shell; a taxonomically diverse fauna; and botanical remains including wild barley and legumes. The site is notable for its deposits or clusters of artefacts, mostly ranged against interior walls or near the opening of Structure 1.
These include Cluster 11 (comprising a pestle lodged in a mortar, a second mortar, second pestle, and two grinding stones) and Cluster 9 (comprising a sickle with inset bladelets, 21 lunates, 5 gazelle phalanges, 7 polished stones, 1 bladelet core, a broken bone haft, a fragmentary bone bead, and a fragmentary bone pendant) - items involved in a wide variety of tool manufacture and maintenance, hunting and gathering, and food processing activities. The sickle discovered in Cache 9 proved to be unique double-sickle, inset with two ranges of five retouched bladelets.
