Founders of the First Villages

This presentation will review results from the recent fieldwork project, ‘Earliest Village People: the shift to sedentary life in the Natufian period’, funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant. The research efforts were centred on the Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 in the Jordan Valley (12,000–12,500 BCE). The settlement represents one of the world’s earliest villages, established by hunter-gatherers near the end of the last Ice Age. The 2022 season encountered the most complex late Pleistocene multiple burial discovered in the Levant over the last 70 years. Most notably, a large pit feature has yielded a spectacular series of articulated bodily ornaments that includes bracelets, necklaces, pendants and caches of tools. A 2024 study season, held in troubled times, continued the conservation and analysis of the artefacts and human skeletal remains at Pella, and the study of both legitimately excavated and intriguing clandestine finds at the Dar as-Saraya Museum in Irbid.

Dr Phillip Edwards is an Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology & History at La Trobe University. His principal areas of research involve the origins of sedentism and village life, with a fieldwork focus on the east Jordan valley. There his recent efforts have focussed on the Natufian site of Wadi Hammeh 27 (12,000–12,500 BCE) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A site of Zahrat adh- Dhra‘ 2 (9,200–8,300 BCE). His recent research ventures have included the ‘Earliest Village People: the shift to sedentary life in the Natufian period’ project, supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, and the publication project ‘The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Site of Zahrat adh-Dhra‘ 2 and the Dawn of Farming by the Dead Sea’, supported by a White Levy Grant. He is also currently researching an academic biography project: ‘Marvellous to have a check on one’s imagination: James Mellaart’s alternative archaeological career’, under La Trobe University Ethics Permit HEC 18442.