Neolithic pastoralism in marginal environments during the Holocene wet phase, northern Saudi Arabia

Abstract

The transition from hunting and gathering to food producing economies in Arabia took the form of a shift to mobile pastoralism. Domestic livestock appears to have been introduced in the 7th millennium BCE (Drechsler 2007), when northern Arabia experienced ameliorated environments during the Holocene wet phase (Engel et al. 2012; Dinies et al. 2015). However, crop cultivation and other features traditionally 2 used to define the Neolithic do not seem to have been practised until the Bronze Age (see for example Magee 2014, Preston et al. 2012). This is in stark contrast to the Fertile Crescent, where the Neolithisation process was set in motion by increasingly sedentary groups, culminating in the control and domestication of both plants and animals (Bar-Yosef 2001). The architectural remains of sedentary communities - dwellings, storage facilities, and communal property - are highly visible in the archaeological record and have become iconic for the Neolithic of the Levant. In the ecologically more marginal areas of the Jordanian Badia, Neolithic communities adapted other economic strategies. Here, settlements were occupied seasonally, and subsistence was based on caprine herding, supplemented by hunting and opportunistic agriculture. Nevertheless, architectural remains attest to the construction and use of substantial dwellings throughout the Neolithic (Henry et al. 2003, Martin & Edwards 2013; Rollefson et al. 2014; 2016).