the Neanderthal inhabitants of Kebara Cave. Was the head removed in an act of ancestor veneration or to defile the last remains of a hated enemy? It is impossible to know.
But we can know that the Neanderthal residents of Kebara Cave were making place, distinguishing cooking areas and tool-making spaces, differentiating the space of the living from the space of the dead. They exhibited this human propensity to create order at home.
This attention to domestic order even in simple dwellings is evidenced by the amazing discoveries at the site of Ohalo II in Israel. Dating to 23,000 years ago, Ohalo II is an open-air camp site on the edge of the Sea of Galilee. In the late 1980s water levels dropped 2–3 meters during a seven-year drought, and, as the lake waters receded, Ohalo II was exposed.
Because the site had been flooded soon after it was abandoned, the preservation of organic materials was extraordinary: charred seeds and fruits from more than one hundred plant species. Thousands of bone fragments—from gazelles, sixty species of waterfowl, and freshwater fish—indicated a year-round occupation that probably lasted no more than a few generations, a relative permanent settlement only abandoned when rising lake waters flooded the site.
In an area of 35 × 30 meters, archaeologists at Ohalo II uncovered the remains of six ancient huts interspersed with a half-dozen open-air hearth areas. The open-air hearth areas were large patches that had been burned at different times. Food debris and flint flakes clustered around the hearth areas. The huts were oval shelters built from branches of tamarisk, willow, and oak—quickly constructed dwellings, each 5–13 square meters in area. Sometime in antiquity, the huts had burned down, creating a dense layer of carbonized materials that preserved food remains and building materials.
The hut floors dipped slightly below the ground surface, and cross-sectioning excavations in Hut 1 exposed three different floors interspersed with thin layers of clays and sands. The meticulous excavations uncovered fascinating details of ancient life. People chipped flint tools inside the huts. Small clusters of tiny fish bones were from baskets of stored fish. But perhaps the most fascinating discoveries were the beds.
Three huts contained evidence of beds made from the stems of alkali grasses. The most complete bed was found in the lowest floor of Hut 1. Hut 1 had a central hearth surrounded by a layer of grass. Alkali grasses have soft and delicate stems, and the people of Ohalo II had harvested the grasses by cutting them off at the ground (no roots were found), tying them into bundles, and then carefully placing the grass stems on the hut floor, forming an inch-thick cushion.
Ohalo II has the earliest evidence of human bedding yet known, and it illustrates how ancient people constructed space. In the case of Ohalo II, the advantages of the location were obvious: the lake provided fresh water, fish, and waterfowl, wild plants supplied food and building materials, and the shoreline was a nice flat spot for a camp site. But onto that natural landscape, the people of Ohalo II imposed another layer of order: distinguishing areas for cooking and tool making, separating hearth areas and huts, and then taking that extra little step—a soft bed of grass.
Even after 23,000 years, it makes me want to take a nap.
This human propensity towards spatial order is evident in archaeological sites throughout prehistory. Different activities occur in different places. For example, detailed studies of Upper Paleolithic sites in France show how the different stages of butchering reindeer left behind distinctive patterns: the first stages of cutting up the large bloody carcass occurred away from the center of the camp, and leaving behind circular patches empty of bones or artifacts where the carcass had lain, surrounded by bones from less-desirable cuts like vertebrae.13 In contrast, haunches, ribs, and other meaty chunks were carried back to the cooking hearths. At the site of Pincevent it was possible to refit bone fragments from the same reindeer to show how meat was shared among three households.
Another fascinating study of modern hunters and gatherers documented this same human care in making space, even in highly mobile camps only occupied for a few days at a time.
During the 1970s, archaeologist James F. O’Connell spent twenty months studying mobile groups of modern Alyawara, an aboriginal group living in the sand plains and scrub forests of central Australia.14 The Alyawara had been in contact with Anglo-Australians since the late nineteenth century, although sustained contact only occurred after livestock ranches were established in the 1920s. By the time of O’Connell’s study, the Alyawara were tightly tied to Australia’s national economy, working for wages as ranch hands, dependent on government support, and living in large, semipermanent settlements near ranches or on government reserves. Nevert heless, about one-quarter of the Alyawara’s food came from hunting and gathering, and the traces of these activities were evident in their modern, residential sites.
The Alyawara are not fossilized representatives of the Upper Paleolithic, as their camps made obvious. Shelters often consisted of wind-breaks—roofed for shade in the summer or open to capture the warmth of winter sun—built from corrugated sheet metal, brush, and canvas tarpaulins.
As the Alyawara moved through their days, they left behind different clusters of artifacts and domestic debris, concentrations O’Connell referred to as “activity areas.” The larger the household and/or the longer they lived in one place, the larger and more diffuse the activity areas became. With longer occupancies, a distinctive circle of garbage formed around the camp, as the central zone of the camp was swept and trash was redeposited (particularly on the downwind side).
Even when the activities and artifacts were utterly “modern,” their distributions had aspects paralleling ancient hunting and gathering sites. Alyawara men own cars and light trucks, vehicles generally in poor condition and requiring frequent repair. O’Connell mapped activity areas he dubbed “auto repair stations.” These activity areas were adjacent to, but away from, the owner’s household activity area. The auto repair station consisted of an open area 10–20 meters in diameter, surrounded by a dump of parts designed to keep the working area clear of obstacles. Beverage lids and pull tabs clustered under shade trees or sunscreens or in the areas surrounding roasting pits and hearths, while large cans ended up in the peripheral dumps. Households near each other tended to be occupied by closely related women. And, finally, only the very smallest artifacts and debris were found in the places where they were originally used; larger objects were cleaned up and dumped elsewhere in any camp occupied for more than a few days.
But despite other significant differences between the sites, I feel a bemused pleasure in the idea that a group of Alyawara men bent over the chassis of a battered Volvo create an archaeological feature similar to the bloody men butchering reindeer at the Upper Paleolithic site of Pincevent.
. . .
Mobile hunters and gatherers think about landscape in ways that are fundamentally different from those of more sedentary folks, whether fishing or farming communities. The archaeologist Deni Seymour, who has conducted extensive research in the southern American Southwest, highlights the fundamental difference in the way mobile vs. sedentary groups choose places to live. “For mobile groups,” she writes, “the arrival at a residential location involves an appraisal of the character of place…. Whereas sedentary groups establish a place, modify the space, organize within it, structure it, and build it, many mobile groups find an appropriate location and adjust their activities to the circumstance and setting. Thus, it is a ‘selection’ of place rather than a ‘creation’ of place that differentiates mobile groups. This difference is fundamental for understanding the ways mobile groups use space and transform the properties of a place.”15
The ephemeral traces of short-term dwellings are easily overlooked, even in sites that are not particularly old. For example, Seymour has studied the material traces of dwellings at one of the last camps occupied by Geronimo and his band at Cañon de los Embudos, in northern Sonora, Mexico. Harried by the U.S. cavalry and threatened by the Mexican army,
