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Radiocarbon Evidence for the Pace of the M-/L-PPNB Transition in 8th Millennium BC Southwest Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2017

Piotr Jacobsson Open the ORCID record for Piotr Jacobsson [Opens in a new window]
Piotr Jacobsson*
Affiliation:
Council for British Research in the Levant Ringgold Standard Institution – British Institute in Amman, Amman, Jordan; and Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre Ringgold Standard Institution – Radiocarbon Laboratory, East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author. Email: pt.jacobsson@gmail.com.
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Abstract

The transition from the Middle to Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) happened throughout southwest Asia in the mid-8th millennium cal BC. It entailed the abandonment of a number of sites, rapid growth of others, as well as the wide spread of morphologically domestic caprines. What remains an unknown is how rapid these processes were in real time. Over the period when the transition was taking place, the calibration curve has two shallow sections divided by a sudden drop, which for many of the older dates creates an illusion of a sudden cultural break around 7600–7500 cal BC. Yet a more detailed study presented in this paper suggests that the transition event could have been spread over a more extended period of time. This, however, is still far from certain due to risks of old wood effects and complexities of site formation.

Keywords

Bayesian analysislegacy datesPre-Pottery Neolithic
Type
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Information
Radiocarbon , Volume 59 , Special Issue 6: 8th International Symposium, Edinburgh, 27 June – 1 July, 2016 Part 2 of 2 , December 2017 , pp. 1677 - 1689
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© 2017 by the Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of the University of Arizona 

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Footnotes

Selected Papers from the 8th Radiocarbon & Archaeology Symposium, Edinburgh, UK, 27 June–1 July 2016

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