Rivers of the Levant
The Levant is drained by some
of the world’s most renowned rivers - notably the twin rivers of Mesopotamia,
the Euphrates and the Tigris, but also the Orontes, which flows northwards along
the Dead Sea Fault Zone from Lebanon and across Syria to enter the Mediterranean
Sea in Hatay Province, southern Turkey. These and other major rivers in the
area have well developed Quaternary sedimentary archives, mostly, but not entirely,
disposed as depositional (aggradational) terraces. As in NW Europe, these are
important repositories for Lower and Middle Palaeolithic artefacts: stone tools
and the waste from their manufacture. They also contain, in a few places, fossils
of plants and animals, which can provide evidence of past environments (at the
time of deposition).
There are several means of dating
the deposits, ranging from luminescence techniques (these can date the last
exposure to daylight of sands sealed in the fluvial deposits) to the use of
uranium and related isotopes to measure the age of the cement in calcreted
gravels (clearly this can provide only a minimum age). In some systems the
river deposits are interbedded with Quaternary volcanic rocks that can readily
be dated, using isotopes of argon produced by radioactive decay of potassium.
Once well dated, the gravel terraces can provide a framework for understanding
the development of stone-tool technologies, as recorded in the artefact assemblages
from the different valleys.
The findings from research of
this type can perhaps address fundamental questions in Quaternary science
and in Palaeolithic archaeology, such as how and by which routes humans colonized
the globe. The Fertile Crescent of northern Syria and southern Turkey provides
the palaeogeographic context for early human migrations from Africa to Eurasia.
This research programme aims to improve the three-dimensional mapping of the
river terraces as well as to date them. It promises to provide the chronological
framework for human migrations as well as a long-term record of fluvial and
landscape history for the area that subsequently witnessed the agricultural
and urban revolutions.
The key research questions to
be addressed are:
- the history of early human
activity in this region, as documented by the archaeological record from the
river terrace sequences
- the history of crustal deformation
and landscape evolution in this region, which is straddled by structural boundaries
and active fault zones