Persistent and ephemeral places in the Early Epipaleolithic in the Wadi al-Hasa region of the western highlands of Jordan

Abstract Early Epipaleolithic groups in the Levant often are described as highly mobile. Although there are some exceptions (e.g., Kharaneh IV and Ohalo II), most sites are aerially small and said to represent short-term camps. In this paper, we use information from the Early Epipaleolithic occupations at KPS-75, Yutil al-Hasa, Tor Sageer, and Tor at-Tareeq in the Wadi al-Hasa region of Jordan to examine their nature as persistent places in the landscape, which yield cumulative palimpsests that often result in time-averaging of the activities and events that occurred at these locales. We argue that aerially small sites do not necessarily constitute short-term occupations because sites that might indicate high mobility as part of the spatial palimpsest of the landscape would have been quite ephemeral and often are not recorded by traditional surveys which focus on identifying highly visible sites rather than on systematically recording nonsite locales.