The fauna of Tell Aswad (Damascus, Syria), early Neolithic levels. Comparison with the northern and southern Levant sites

Résumé En

The first occupation levels at Tell Aswad, a Neolithic site located in the central Levant near Damascus (Syria), dates to the end of the Early PPNB period. These architectural levels had yielded a low amount of faunal remains but their chronological position and the geographical location of the settlement make their study of great archaeozoological interest. The archaeological material found in these occupation levels shows affinities with both northern and southern Levant sites: for instance, the flint tools are rather southern-related in a typological point of view but the knapping technology produced northern-type supports. The study of the faunal remains provides also some similarities with both regions: importance of the hunting of small game and also presence of caprines since the oldest level. The present study addresses two issues: 1) Ovis, Capra, Sus and Bos; were they domesticated at the beginning of the settlement? 2) How did these taxa take part in the particular dynamics of the northern and southern areas regarding the animal domestication? Different statistical methods – Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Log size index (LSI) and Mosimann’s method – are here applied on the same biometric data in order to study the variations of the bone size as well as those of the shape. According to the results obtained, sheep were domestic in the early levels and the status of the goats and pigs is also probably domestic. However, nothing can be asserted for the bovines because of the lack of measurements. The comparison with other regions shows different evolutions of the livestock. If it seems to have been acculturation from the North, the adoption of some techniques was made in a way that was particular to the South