Excavations at what is believed to be the earliest known Neolithic quarry in central Israel revealed new insight on the historic transition from hunter-gatherer to farming culture.
Dating back 11,000 years, finds from the site include evidence suggesting large-scale quarrying activities took place to extract flint and limestone for the purpose of manufacturing working tools.
This discovery, led by Leore Grosman and Professor Naama Goren-Inbar from the Institute of Archeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, demonstrates how inhabitants of the Neolithic communities altered their landscape forever.
"Humans became more dominant and influential in their terrestrial landscape and Kaizer Hill quarry provides dramatic evidence to the alteration of the landscape," Grosman explained.
The introduction of farming is widely regarded as one of the major changes in human history, when people "domesticated" the landscape and learned to produce their own food rather than hunt for it.
Researchers say Kaizer Hill quarry is the first of its age, size and scope to be revealed in the southern Levant, where early farming communities developed and Neolithic cultures are believed to have emerged.
Therefore, the quarry has been assigned to the Neolithic Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) culture - one of the incipient cultural stages in the shift from a hunter-gatherer to a farming way of life.
"The economic shift, from hunter-gatherers to agriculture, was accompanied by numerous changes in the social and technological spheres," Goren-Inbar added. "Various quarrying marks including cup marks showed that the cutting of stones was done in various strategies, including identifying potential flint pockets; creating quarrying fronts on the rocks; removing blocks to allow extraction of flint; creating areas for quarrying dump; and using drilling and chiseling as a primary technique for extracting flint."
Researchers also found damaged rock surfaces at the peak of the site's 300-meter-high hill, indicating quarrying activity aimed at extracting flint nodules and exploiting the thick layer of sedimentary rock known as caliche.
"The ancient people at the time carved the stone with flint working tools (for example axes)," researchers wrote in their study. "This suggestion differs from the commonly held view, which considers all features defined as cup marks to be devices that were primarily involved in a variety of grinding, food preparation, social or even symbolic activities."
Their findings were recently published in the journal PLOS ONE.
