Jordan River Dureijat -JRD

For over 10,000 years, people returned to the same spot on the southern edge of the Paleo-Hula Lake to exploit aquatic resources. They left fishhooks and fishing weights in the layers of the Epipaleolithic (EP) site of Jordan River Dureijat (JRD), evidence for evolution in fishing technology and changing lifeways.

JRD is an ephemeral, short-term encampment located on the shore of Paleolake Hula that was intermittently occupied over a span of about 10,000 years (ca. 20,000 to 10,000 cal BP) during the Levantine Epipaleolithic period.

The 14C chronology of JRD demonstrates that its upper layers accumulated during the Early Levantine Neolithic and the lowest has remains dating to ca. 20k years BP, hence including the entire Levantine EP.

This time interval saw the most significant change in human history – the shift from nomadic hunter-gatherer bands to the sedentary agricultural communities of the Neolithic. At the same time, world climate witnessed a dramatic change with the collapse of the Ice Age regime, from the last glacial maximum (LGM) to onset of the present inter-glacial, the Holocene. Sites documenting the entire EP period are rare in the Levant, and the JRD layers are also unique in their superb preservation of organic, in particular, botanic remains.

Such remains provide excellent proxies for studying the chronology and magnitude of post-LGM climatic and environmental changes in the Levant, the nature and magnitude of which are highly disputed. A primary lacuna in the debate is the factor of time. It is difficult to evaluate causes and effects of climate change absent solid comparative data for the magnitude of past climate changes over time.