Geochemical characterization of Anatolian tephras from Late Middle and Early Upper Palaeolithic sites in the Jebel Qalkha area, southern Jordan

The Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in the Levant is characterized by key archaeological shifts, including the interaction between Neanderthals and AMH and the appearance and dispersal of the Upper Palaeolithic. During this period there is also potential for abrupt climatic transitions to influence the distribution of humans across the region. One issue is the precision and resolution to which we can date Levantine archaeological sites and the wider environmental record. Ongoing studies have demonstrated that archaeological sites in this region receive volcanic ash horizons (tephra), which can be utilised as a tool to provide chronological markers to date archaeological sites and to link them to important palaeoclimate records (Barzilai et al., 2022).

Here we present the detailed cryptotephra stratigraphic profiles from two Jordanian archaeological sites in the Jebel Qalkha area, one Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) to Epipalaeolithic site – Tor Hamar, and another Late Middle Palaeolithic (LMP) site – Tor Faraj. The data include tephra shard concentrations in different cultural layers. We also present new major and trace element geochemical data that trace the majority of these tephra layers to Anatolian volcanic centres. This allows existing radiometric ages for some of these tephra to provide additional age constraints in these archaeological sites. Our data show the potential for sites in this region to be correlated into Anatolian and Aegean volcanic records and distal environmental records from marine cores and the Dead Sea sequence (Kearney et al., 2022). This would allow further underpinning of studies that link environmental change with early human adaptations in the region.

 

Barzilai, O., Oron, M., Porat, N., White, D., Timms, R., Blockley, S., Zular, A., Avni, Y., Faershtein, G., Weiner, S. and Boaretto, E., 2022. Expansion of eastern Mediterranean Middle Paleolithic into the desert region in early marine isotopic stage 5. Scientific reports, 12(1), p.4466.

Kearney, R., Schwab, M. J., Neugebauer, I., Pickarski, N., and Brauer, A.: The TephroMed project: Precise synchronising of two key palaeoclimatic ICDP records of the eastern Mediterranean using tephra, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-468, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-468, 2022.