Southwest Asian Late Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age Demand for “Big-Tools”: Specialized Flint Exploitation Beyond the Fringes of Settled Regions

A ‘marginal’ region with many options: the diversity of Chalcolithic/Early Bronze Age socio-economic activities in the hinterland of Jawa

“…82;Müller-Neuhof in press b), the source of the blanks for the production of these tools remained unknown until the 1990s, when mines and quarries with clear evidence for specialization in the production of blanks for cortical scrapers were discovered on the northern (Quintero et al 2002) and north-western (Fujii 2000(Fujii , 2003 fringe of the Jafr basin in southeast Jordan. In 2000, R. Eichmann and the author discovered similar sites in the Wadi Ruwayshid region on the western flank of the al-Risha plateau in north-east Jordan (Müller-Neuhof 2006). These were investigated extensively in 2010 and 2012 (Müller-Neuhof 2013a, 2013b, in press a).…”

“…These tools are also known as fan-scrapers, tabular scrapers, or 'Jafr-tools': descriptions of these artefacts, their distribution in south-west Asia, and their possible functions can be found in Schmidt (1996) and Müller-Neuhof (2013a: 71, 76-77, 2013b. Although these tools are attested in comparatively large numbers in C/EBA assemblages in south-west Asia, stretching from southern Anatolia in the north, through Syria and (at least) western Mesopotamia, to Egypt in the south (Schmidt 1996: 90-91, Abb.…”

“…One possible scenario is that mining and blank production was carried out by pastoral groups; passing through the mining region with their herds in the course of their annual cycle (Müller-Neuhof 2013a: 78, 2013d. Subsequently, blanks were carried to their western grazing territories where they were exchanged with local sedentary consumers.…”

A techno-typological analysis of fan (tabular) scrapers from Ein Zippori, Israel

“…In defining 'size', the citations from Rosen (1983) and Quintero et al (2002) contain an internal contradiction, deriving probably from the intensively resharpened and broken state of some fan scrapers. Others (Fujii 2011;Müller-Neuhof 2013) use the term 'palm-sized'. In our view, however, size cannot be used to define fan scrapers since there is evident variation in size that probably resulted from repetitive resharpening.…”

“…However, it is not clear whether the flatness refers to the dorsal face or the ventral face, or both. Abe (2008) and Müller-Neuhof (2013) include the term 'thin' without any further details. Moreover, while there are thin fan scrapers, similar tools made on flakes that are 'not thin' (from 1.5 to 2 cm thick) have been found in PN, CHG, and EBA lithic assemblages (Crowfoot-Payne 1983: 720-721;Greenhut 1989;Rosen 1993;Marder et al 1995;McCartney & Betts 1998;Bankirer & Marder 2003;Yannai & Ariel 2006;Barkai & Gopher 2012: 838, 839;Akkermans et al 2014).…”