Pushing back the MARGINS: investigating the PPNC-Late Neolithic conquest of near-eastern arid lands through settlement pattern analyses and landscape studies

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At the end of the Near Eastern neolithization process (PPNC-Late Neolithic, 7th-6th millennium), a wide conquest of arid margins occurred while large villages collapsed in the Fertile Crescent. Early hypotheses posited that population movements reflected demographic pressure and took place from the western greener valleys to eastern steppes. Despite a nowadays agreement on more dynamic processes of multi-directional cultural interchanges, the complexity of this wide phenomenon remains to be understood. To achieve this goal and thanks to an integrative approach, MARGINS aims to propose renewed scenarios of ‘conquest’ and to clarify its factors of influence, in particular the respective impacts of environmental components and socio-economic choices. To do so, the project will investigate settlement patterns and land use through subsistence activities and their adaptations to constraints of arid contexts. As an impetus for the project, I question in particular the role of the pastoral nomadism, later considered as a marginal way of life, as a central driving force for this sustainable occupation of arid lands, and the status of the Syrian steppes as a cradle for the conquest towards the south, in Jordan. The project will rely for the first time for the period and region under study on a multi-scalar and diachronic approach of socio-economic mechanisms implemented thanks to quantitative and spatial analyses with the help of statistics, GIS and remote sensing technics. MARGINS will break through barriers that have prevented a “big picture approach” of the Neolithic ‘conquest’ of near eastern arid lands by bringing together an unprecedented combination of methods, interdisciplinary specialists and renown international institutions – the CNRS research unit CEPAM in France and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in the USA – involved in the processing of the largest set of raw archaeological data gathered both in Syria and in Jordan in the past 50 years.