Perhaps the most important "revolution" which has occurred in the past ten millennia and which has affected all populations in all parts of the world is the domestication of plants and animals. To understand the factors which have shaped the development of world societies today this factor must be taken into account. This research examines and has the potential to shed light on the multiple, complex and interacting forces involved in the domestication of one species. Under the direction of Dr. Natalie Munro, Jacqueline Meier will investigate ancient ritual practices through the analysis of animal bones from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) archaeological site of Kfar HaHoresh (KHH)(ca. 8500-6750 cal BC), Israel. KHH served as a rare ritual center in the PPNB, a period of considerable subsistence change marked by goat domestication in Southwest Asia. Animal domestication, or the process by which wild animals became genetically modified and tamed by humans, was a key component of the transition from foraging to farming, and irreversibly revolutionized how people interact with animals and with each other. The social, economic and ideological changes that were involved in the forager-farmer transition are most often considered separately, despite close interaction between these components in daily life. When combined, these factors have much greater power to assess the drivers of the Neolithization process in parts of the Middle East and greater southwest Asia.
The PPNB site of KHH is an ideal setting to integrate these aspects by exploring ritual practice against a backdrop of transformative economic change at this pivotal point in human history. This secluded mortuary site in the Nazareth Hills of the Israeli Galilee region has yielded provocative evidence of ritual activities involving animals. This includes human burials with associated animal remains, a large feasting pit containing the remains of wild cattle, as well as less obvious deposits of small caches of animal parts and disposal events. This project will contribute to recent studies focused on exceptional examples of Neolithic ritual practices by refining methods to detect less obvious types of ritual activities involving animals. Animal bones will be used to document the types of species and body-parts used in ritual practices at KHH. Additionally, demographic profiles and body-size data will be used to determine whether the goats from at KHH were domestic or wild, because domesticated animals have different symbolic roles and economic value in rituals than their wild counterparts. By revealing the full spectrum of rituals practiced at KHH during a period that has been linked to the dawn of organized religion and animal domestication, this study will investigate how new ritual practices developed within the context of contemporaneous economic change.
This project will contribute high-resolution, faunal subsistence and animal management data to debates that are central to the origins of agriculture, the function and symbolism of PPN rituals and the process of goat domestication. The faunal database will be made available via open internet access following publication so that others studying domestication in this and surrounding regions can use it for comparison. This project will also develop criteria for identifying deposits associated with ritual practice, which will be applicable for an array of archaeological sites in different times and places. Finally, this study will contribute to the research exchange between American and Israeli scholars. A long-term data collection period and continued work with the KHH archaeological field school will provide graduate and undergraduate student training in animal bone and teeth identification and curation techniques in the field and lab.
