Chapter 5: Neolithic 3 Palestine (Page 359-360)

Excerpts and Definitions and Addendums

There are a number of sites in Palestine with characteristic structures, flint assemblages and pottery which were occupied later than Neolithic 2 and before the Palestinian Chalcolithic, that is the culture typical of Ghassul and related sites. I described the material remains and economy of these sites, their sequence of development and place within the Neolithic of the Levant in an article published in 1973. I placed all these sites in a single period which I called the Late Neolithic of Palestine. This period was divided into early and late stages called phases 1 and 2. I distinguished two geographical groups in phase 1 and three in phase 2. I had to determine the Late Neolithic sequence of developnent and the geographical divisions on comparative stratigraphy and artifact typology since there were no carbon 14 determinations available from any site occupied in that period .....

We can be fairly sure that the transition from the Late Neolithic to the Chalcolithic in Palestine took place about 3750 or 3500 B.C. but we do not know for certain when it began. Much depends on quite general typological comparisons between the Late Neolithic sites in Palestine and contemporary sites to the north such as Byblos which are themselves not very precisely dated. All too few carbon 14 determinations have been made on material from sites in the Levant occupied in the 6th, 5th and 4th millennia, partly because so many of them were excavated many years ago. Recently excavated sites which were occupied in Neolithic 1 and 2 can be much more precisely dated simply because several of them have a series of carbon 14 dates .....

The late Neolithic sequence I was able to establish for Palestine still seems valid for that region although the term Late Neolithic itself does not accord very well with the general terminology I am using in this thesis for the Neolithic of the Levant. I will not, therefore, use Late Neolithic here but will treat the sites concerned as they occur in each stage of the Neolithic of the Levant. I hope to be able to show that the sites I previously described as Late Neolithic phase 1 fall within Neolithic 3 of the Levant and those of Late Neolithic phase 2 within the last stage, Neolithic 4 .....

I will now briefly describe the principal phase 1 sites in each geographical group. I shall also mention the other known phase 1 sites which I did not discuss in my earlier paper in order to determine as fully as possible their distribution ...

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