THE IMPACT OF ACCELERATOR DATING AT THE EARLY VILLAGE OF ABU HUREYRA ON THE EUPHRATES

The early village of Abu Hureyra is significant because of its great size (ca. 11.5 ha) and long sequence of occupation (ca. 11,500-7000 BP) that spans the transition from late Pleistocene hunting and gathering to early Holocene farming, and the cultural change from Epipaleolithic to Neolithic. The 40 accelerator dates obtained for Abu Hureyra provide new information on the development of agriculture in Southwest Asia. The dates have demonstrated that the site was inhabited for much longer than the few conventional radiocarbon dates for the site had suggested. The gap between the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic villages seems to have been brief. A change in climate and vegetation, dated at ca. 10,600 BP, during the span of occupation of the Epipaleolithic village, precipitated an adjustment in the foraging way of life of its inhabitants just before the inception of agriculture. Dating of individual bones and seeds has shown that the wild progenitors of sheep and several cereals were present near Abu Hureyra in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene, well outside their present areas of distribution. This has implications for where those species may have been domesticated. A rapid switch from exploitation of the gazelle to herding of sheep and goats during the Neolithic occupation occurred ca. 8300 BP. THE SITE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE Abu Hureyra was a very large prehistoric settlement mound (11.5 ha) in the Euphrates Valley of northern Syria. It consisted of two superimposed villages, Abu Hureyra 1, inhabited by late Epipaleolithic sedentary hunter-gatherers, and Abu Hureyra 2, an early Neolithic community of farmers. There was a brief hiatus in occupation between the two. The remains of the Abu Hureyra 2 village, consisting of the debris from numerous mudbrick houses, comprised the bulk of the deposits in the mound. Abu Hureyra is significant because it was occupied for an unusually long period of time during the transition from foraging to farming, one of the major transformations in human existence. The information recovered from the site has illuminated the course of this fundamental change in human society and economy, and the context in which it occurred. The great size of the Abu Hureyra 2 settlement and its cultural remains are a remarkable testament of the immediate consequences of the new way of life for early farming communities. The site was excavated in 1972 and 1973 during a campaign of salvage excavations that preceded the completion of a dam across the Euphrates (Moore 1975). Intense analysis of the artifacts and organic remains from the excavation has taken place in the last decade, and it is this research that has provided the framework for the series of radiometric dates discussed here, all of which are uncalibrated.