Prehistoric Environment and Settlement in the Azraq Basin. A Report on the 1982 Survey Season

Abstract

During the past decade there has been a great increase in prehistoric survey and excavation in the arid lands of south-west Asia. There have been three, main reasons for this. Firstly, the need to correct the geographical imbalance of earlier work which concentrated on the Fertile Cresent. Secondly, the growing interest in reconstructing regional settlement patterns. The present day desert areas offer much better site survival than the more fertile regions with their recent agricultural and urban disturbance. Thirdly, prehistorians have become increasingly interested in the interrelationship between man and his environment. This relationship is particularly finely balanced along the borders of the arid zone. The major projects which have focused on the prehistory. of the desert regions of the Levant have been those of Bar Yosef and Phillips (1977) in Sinai, Marks (1976, 1977, 1983) in the Negev, Henry (1983, forthcoming) in southern jordan, Suzuki and Hanihara in the Palmyra region of Syria (Suzuki and Kobori 1970, Suzuki and Takai 1973, 1974; Hanihara and Sakaguchi 1978; Hanihara and Akazawa 1979, 1983) and Besancon et al. (1982) and Cauvin (1982) in neighbouring EI Kowm. During 1975 the author also began such a project in the Azraq Basin of eastern jordan (Garrard et al. 1975, 1977). The project was undertaken partly for the reasons described above, but also to obtain information on the role of the marginal areas fringing the Fertile Crescent in the beginnings of animal and plant husbandry. The Azraq Basin itself was chosen because rich prehistoric sites containing organic material had been found in the region by earlier workers (Waechter