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Back to base: re-thinking variations in settlement and mobility behaviors in the Levantine Late Middle Paleolithic as seen from Shovakh Cave

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Abstract

Shovakh cave is a late Middle Paleolithic cave site in Northern Israel, situated ca. 8 km from the Sea of Galilee. The Cave was originally was excavated by Sally Binford in 1962, and results of the analyses of its lithic assemblages played a major role in the then-raging Bordes-Binford debate, as well as in the initiation of the field of inquires known as “technological organization.” A renewed excavation in 2016 led to a better understanding of site formation at the cave and to a refined chrono-stratigraphic framework of the Middle Paleolithic occupations at the site. Here we present the results of the analyses of lithic and faunal assemblages combining material from both the original and renewed excavations at the site. Together with the results of the geoarcheological work, we are able to offer a refined reconstruction of the modes of occupation in the site as well as of its role within late MP settlement systems in the Levant. We show that during three periods of site occupation, settlements in Shovakh were mostly ephemeral, a rare phenomenon among the late MP cave sites. At the same time, the lithic and faunal assemblages suggest that the nature of these ephemeral occupations differed temporally and spatially. In each of these cases, the fitting scenario for Shovakh’s occupations is as a “transient camp,” used over short-term occupations.

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Acknowledgements

Excavations at Shovakh cave were conducted under permit #G-86/2016 from the Israel Antiquities authority. We are grateful to Masha Krakovsky, Netta Mitki, Nadav Nir, Marion Prevost, Ahiad Ovadia, Micka Ullman and the Schattner family for their help in the field and beyond. We thank Natalia Gubenko for her help in making the Shovakh material from the Israel Antiquity Authorities storage available for our study. Rivka Rabinovich enabled our access to the faunal material in the National Natural History collection (HUJ). We are grateful to the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments that helped in improving this article. Permission to excavate in the Nahal Amud Nature Reserve was granted by the Israel Nature and Park Authority. This study was funded by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 1232/2015) to E.H. for the project “Hominins and their environments in Nahal Amud during the Upper Pleistocene” and by grants to R.E. and A.M-B. from the Irene Levy-Sala CARE Foundation and from the Bina and Moshe Stekelis Foundation for Prehistoric Research in Israel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. MONREPOS, Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution, Schloss Monrepos, 56567, Neuwied, Germany

    Ariel Malinsky-Buller

  2. The Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, 91905, Jerusalem, Israel

    Ariel Malinsky-Buller, Ravid Ekshtain & Erella Hovers

  3. Dept. of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, 06269, USA

    Natalie Munro

  4. Institute of Human Origins, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Erella Hovers

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  1. Ariel Malinsky-Buller
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Correspondence to Ariel Malinsky-Buller.

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Table 1

Contexts with potentially intrusive fauna or objects. Fresh refers to bones with a yellow, crisp appearance with no surface damage. (DOCX 15 kb)

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Malinsky-Buller, A., Ekshtain, R., Munro, N. et al. Back to base: re-thinking variations in settlement and mobility behaviors in the Levantine Late Middle Paleolithic as seen from Shovakh Cave. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 13, 112 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-021-01313-4

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