Adams/Jordan, 4. The Neolithic Period

Beginning in the 1980s the pace of Neolithic research in Jordan surged, and in the past five years since the first version of this synthesis appeared (Rollefson 2001), the rate has not slackened, prompting the necessity for a substantial revision. The results of new surveys (e.g. MacDonald and Sawtell 2002; Henry et al . 2001; Amr et al . 1998) and subsequent accelerated excavations continue to produce results in considerable quantity, providing rich details and fleshing out previous skeletal frame- works of social and economic relationships within and between farming and herding populations in a variety of environmental settings across the landscape. One of the fundamental outcomes of this work is the documentation of unsuspected but substantial cultural variability across Jordan that spanned the entire Neolithic period.