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A Zoomorphic Sickle Terminal from the Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan

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posted on 2025-01-23, 03:01 authored by Rosie Robertson, Phillip EdwardsPhillip Edwards, Rosemary Coates
Excavations at the Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan undertaken in 2014 led to the discovery of several new portable art pieces, including the representation of an ungulate mammal (RN 140226), probably intended as a gazelle, carved in the round from bone. The small object was extensively damaged by fire and had become separated at its neck from longer pieces of fragmented, burnt bone lying distally to it. This configuration and the style of the animal head leads us to interpret the piece as the decorated terminal of a bone sickle haft. The piece is unusual in that is it is one of the few figurative Natufian art pieces with incised geometric decoration added to its surface. Its finding extends the distribution of the ‘gazelle-headed’ sickle haft from Mount Carmel, where three well-known examples were unearthed in the early twentieth century, to the northern Jordan Valley. The piece adds to the limited repertoire of zoomorphically rendered Natufian artefacts associated with plant gathering and processing.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under Discovery Project [grant number DP140101049].

History

Publication Date

2019-04-02

Journal

Palestine Exploration Quarterly

Volume

151

Issue

1

Pagination

14p. (p. 36-49)

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

ISSN

0031-0328

Rights Statement

© Palestine Exploration Fund 2019 This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Palestine Exploration Quarterly. Robertson, R., Edwards, P. C., & Coates, R. (2019). A zoomorphic sickle terminal from the Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 in Jordan. Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 151(1), 36–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/00310328.2019.1576410. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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