Final Results of an Analysis of the Sheep and Goat Bones from Ain Ghazal, Jordan

Analyzing the process of domestication: Hagoshrim as a case study

“…Goat domestication is clearly evident by both morphometric and demographic parameters by the PPNC [20,45,64,83,87]. Sheep were most likely domesticated in the northern Levant during the 10th millennium BP [64] and introduced to the southern Levant by the end of the 9th millennium BP, that is, the mid-PPNB [20,22,41,44,83]). The earliest evidence for size reduction of cattle is from the northern Levant and is assigned to the mid-PPNB [65].…”

“…Identifying the process of domestication in the archaeozoological record requires the combined use of several criteria, and largely depends on the exact definition of domestication. There is a growing consensus today that domestication should be viewed as a process which includes a continuum of associations between humans and animals, rather than a dichotomy, yet the exact definition and consequently the identifying criteria are still highly debated ( [24,38,50,66,83,87]; see also [5,13,34,35,37,40,56,65] for earlier discussions). We studied the faunal remains of Hagoshrim, a Neolithic site from the southern Levant, in order to gain insight into the different stages of the process of domestication.…”

Culling profiles: the indeterminacy of archaeozoological data to survivorship curve modelling of sheep and goat herd maintenance strategies

“…They quickly became templates for plotting empirical data to interpret a given age-at-death distribution in an archaeological assemblage (e.g. Marom et al, in press;Wasse, 2002). These models are often presented as survivorship curves, which show the percentage of an age cohort of a sheep and goat herd which survived consecutive time segments (in a highresolution scale of months or consecutive years).…”

Editorial

“…The latter projects (e.g. Garrard et al 1983) played an important role in introducing the methods of environmental and geoarchaeology to the region, while the evidence for caprine domestication was explored by Wasse (2002) in a study of the faunal remains from the large Aceramic Neolithic settlement of 'Ain Ghazzal excavated by Zeidan Kafafi and Gary Rollefson. On the same general theme, is the now widely cited study by Peltenburg et al (2001) of the evidence and possible mechanisms for the spread of domesticates from the Levantine mainland to the island of Cyprus.…”