NEOLITHIC STORYTELLING OR HOW TO TELL A STORY ABOUT THE NEOLITHIC

During our work at Shkārat Msaied, located close to the ancient city of Petra – nowadays Wadi Musa – in Jordan, we had many discussions about how life would have been in the Neolithic: what would a normal day be like, which birds would you hear in the vicinity, which smells would you inhale, and would it even be possible for us to survive more than three days?

When thinking about Neolithic lifeways, we also debated how we could present our various finds, interpretations, and ideas in an understandable way beyond the usual scientific reports. It was then suggested that perhaps a graphic novel could offer such an opportunity (see Macaulay 1979; Swogger 2015). Despite the fact that none of the archaeologists working on the project had made a graphic novel based on archaeological data before, we agreed that we would give this idea a try, not only to explore if such an approach could be a way to present at least some – if not all – aspects of the work conducted at the site, but also if this could be a part of the planned final publication of the archaeological work at Shkārat Msaied. Therefore, this graphic novel is in many aspects an experiment. The decision to produce a graphic novel also meant that we were forced to leave our comfort zone of well-formulated texts written in a hypothetical and academic manner. Instead, we had to make clear decisions on appearances, clothing, tools and their use, material culture, and behaviours – things we have little or no evidence for. The approaches presented here will always represent only one possible interpretation, though we nevertheless aimed to show a variety of options as the story unfolded.

In 2015, we had invited Konrad Nuka Godtfredsen, the artist of this graphic novel, to join us in the field to make some initial reconstruction sketches and to get familiar with the overall setting and colours of the area. In 2017, we received two grants for the project, one from the Danish Institute in Damascus and another from the Danish Ministry of Education and Research. We then started to collect and discuss ideas, possible scenarios, and a list of topics and locations we would like to include in a story that would take place at Neolithic Shkārat Msaied. However, the question remained: how to tell a story about the Neolithic? After some weeks of data assessment and discussion, a story evolved, centering on a 35-year-old woman we had found behind the standing stone in Unit F in 2002.

A first storyline was developed based on our initial ideas and the draft text was completed together with a collection of graphic material to illustrate the various topics and settings. Moritz Kinzel sketched the initial storyboard to test various possibilities and scenarios. The draft with sketches was then handed over to Konrad Nuka. The storyline draft needed adjusting when set out on paper and assembled into the actual graphics. Some scenes needed more space, others could be summarised or deleted. Sometimes it felt like editing a movie, which may demand an extra scene to be filmed or a long-planned sequence to be cut because it is hindering the flow of the narrative. Konrad Nuka got free hands to re-arrange the graphic sequence to ensure a good graphic flow and satisfying aesthetics. His draft sketch of the scene was then re-assessed by the scientific advisory board or specialist in question. Remarks and suggestions were noted directly on the drawings and send back for revision. This process was repeated – when needed – several times to get the best possible result. When everyone was happy with the result, the colouring process started.

During the work process, we realised that we could achieve the best result by looking at an entire episode at once and then going into detail. In this way, we kept an overview of the development of the full sequence. Thinking in entire sequences also helped speed up the process. Konrad Nuka worked with pencil and used watercolours to colour the drawings by hand. In some cases, Moritz carried out smaller adjustments with adobe photoshop in the post-drawing process. Moritz is also responsible for the epilogue presenting an alternative storyline and graphic style.

When working on the story we followed some basic guidelines to ensure a coherent content:

1) We examined our archaeological data and material from Shkārat Msaied to find primary information. If no information could be found there, we widened our research to include published material and finds from neighbouring sites in the greater Petra region, such as Beidha, Ba’ja, Basta, Wadi Faynan 16, Ghwair, etc.

2) If we could not find further information about specific aspects from those sites, we looked into the results from sites in a wider regional context (to the west, north, and east). We are aware of the problems of mixing different regional and local traditions into an ’artificial’ Neolithic culture, which may not have existed, but our wish to rely on contemporary evidence served as a guiding principle here so as to provide the artist with enough background knowledge to create a convincing scenery.

3) Only in rare cases did we include additional material from outside the Near Eastern hemisphere. This was done only to serve as an inspiration for, e.g. clothing or mortuary practices.

As previously mentioned, the story is built around a woman who died at an age of about 35 years. She was found on top of a stone feature (Loc. 50111) behind a vertically placed stone slab (Loc. 60116) in the round structure called Unit F at Shkārat Msaied. These human remains were discovered in 2002 and fully excavated in 2003 by Niels Lynnerup, a specialist in ancient human remains from the Department of Forensic Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. It was actually the first human skeleton to be excavated at Shkārat Msaied (Jensen et al. 2005). Her remains had been treated in a special way in the Neolithic: her skull had been removed and her long bones – still showing traces of ligaments and tissue – had been placed into her chest. Some goat mandibles had been buried alongside her remains, suggesting that some form of feasting had possibly taken place as part of a ceremony.

How does the woman and the fox go together? Fox remains were found in house Unit F and the contexts of the burials. None of them were complete, indicating that only specific parts were brought into the building. Foxes were part of the Neolithic ’mythology’ as their presence on the T-shaped pillars at the Neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe (Turkey) suggests (Peters and Schmidt 2004). They can be seen as mediators between the ’underworld’ and the world of the living. They are night creatures, wanderers, and in that way a (helping) spirit; clever and smart but also cunning and tricky. Interestingly, the fox disappears from the iconography (and also from the mythologies) of the Middle East after the Neolithic. In favour of what we considered a more engaging narrative, we decided to connect two components found in different contexts within the building: the remains of fox from a cache of skulls and a large greenstone bead found in one of the other burial cists in the same building. In the story the ability to communicate with the ‘fox spirit‘ is bound to the greenstone bead.

Surrounding the woman’s narrative are various interwoven life cycles: 1) the annual cycle of seasons (autumn, winter, spring, and summer); 2) the (human) cycle of life and death; and 3) the life cycles of buildings in the settlement; all of which are marked by a number of repetitive events and rituals representing the beginning or end of a cycle.

As the reader may notice, the story has various embedded narrative levels: 1) the archaeological researchers working on the site and trying to understand the finds; 2) a Neolithic narrator telling the story about the woman – who turns out to be her former apprentice; and 3) some episodes of the life of the (headless) woman. The narrative levels are intertwined and influence each other. In order to separate them graphically, the Neolithic thread is depicted in colour, while the archaeology is shown in black and white. For the Neolithic, the text font is in italics, while the archaeological part has a typewriter font. The epilogue and the alternative storyline are set with Comic Sans. It is important to keep in mind when reading the story that all these different narratives are products of our imagination and interpretation. They may be plausible but are still a construct of our time and context. A narrative is more accessible if the protagonists have names; but how do we name someone from the Neolithic? We have no information about their language, what their names for locations may have been, or their perception of space, and no information about whether people had names at all. In what kind of social communities and units did they live together? How were they related? So far, we have not been able to extract any genetic material as the preservation of DNA at Shkārat Msaied was not good enough to enable an analysis. Because of all these uncertainties and to avoid any later cultural connections, we decided not to use names. Instead, we decided to refer to the main protagonist as just ’the woman’, although it should be noted that we have no idea if people defined themselves through their biological gender or shared our modern perception of gender during the Neolithic. For the same reasons, we tried to keep the story as ’gender neutral’ as possible when it came to depicting clothing, hair styles, and the division of labour.

SHKĀRAT MSAIED - SITE SETTING AND LOCATION

The Neolithic site of Shkārat Msaied is located in the sandstone mountain area in the Nemelleh region, about 16 km north of Wadi Musa/Petra in southern Jordan. It belongs to the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (MPPNB) period, which dates between 8340 BCE and 7960 BCE. One older date (Sample number Aar 9336: 9150–8830 BCE) may hint at an earlier phase of occupation at the site. The site had probably also been visited during the Epipalaeolithic because of its location on a high pass from the east into the Rift valley (Hermansen et al. 2006). This well-preserved site is of archaeological and historical importance because it was inhabited in a period marked by crucial developments in subsistence strategies as people began to experiment with cultivation of plants and herding of animals. The (nowadays) semi-arid landscape in which the site is situated was mainly occupied by mobile hunter-gatherer groups in the Neolithic, who lived in circular buildings that were more substantial than in previous periods and who had a rich and diverse material culture. The site is interpreted as a seasonal camp that was visited from autumn to spring, on the way to and from the open forests in the mountains. This is supported by the fact that most of the entrances were found blocked with stones (Kinzel 2013) and because the animal bone assemblage from Shkārat Msaied has a high number of migrating raptors, e.g. black kites, which are only passing through the area in certain times of the year (Bangsgaard 2005).

ON RESEARCH HISTORY

The site was first surveyed by Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk in 1964 during her fieldwork at Neolithic Beidha, situated just 6 km south of Shkārat Msaied. The site was re-located and tested by Hans Georg Gebel in 1984 during his regional survey for the ’Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients’ (TAVO) (Gebel 2002). The site has been under excavation since 1999 by a Danish team from the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (formerly the Carsten Niebuhr Institute) at the University of Copenhagen, first as a field school, with Lea Kaliszan (1999-2000) and Susanne Kerner (2001) as field directors, and then as a research project.

To set the scene for the Neolithic narrative and to introduce the archaeological site of Shkārat Msaied, we decided to open with a sequence highlighting some aspects of the research history of the site. Given the site’s proximity to Petra, it was hard to resist an Indiana Jones inspired introduction. However, the flight scene is technically incorrect as Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk did not travel by plane to Jordan. First of all, there were only a few flights to this destination in those years and these would have been way too expensive for a young scholar like her. She actually went back and forth by a cheap bus and boat ride:

“You see there weren’t these planes. We used to do what we called the Bus Run, the Sixpenny Sick from Beirut to Cyprus to Alexandria to Athens to Genoa to Marseilles – it was hardly a cruise in those ships – most of them at the bottom of the deep blue sea now – thoroughly unseaworthy, all under flags of convenience” (Kirkbride-Helbæk in an interview in 1994).

In 1963 she bought a new VW Beetle, which she drove from Lebanon to Turkey and back to Jordan. She discovered the Neolithic site of Shkārat Msaied while on a survey in April 1964. Her expedition had “twelve camels and their masters, four donkeys, one white horse, a soldier from the Camel Corps, a Department of Antiquities man, Mo[hammed], and a Jericho man […]” and a dog (Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk in a letter dated 17.04.1964). Dr Hans Georg Gebel, on the other hand, came by donkeys to Shkārat Msaied in 1984. The artist, however, envisioned this differently and did not want to discard the Land Rover once it had been set onto paper. Gebel did a brief survey of the site and excavated a test pit (Gebel 1988). The Danish team arrived in 1999 with rental cars after a bulldozer was paid to create a dirt road that would enable a water tank truck to come to the site in order to ensure the water supply for the field school. The team stayed in Bedouin tents on site, going to Wadi Musa only on the weekends. In 2002 the University’s field school moved to Jerash and the work at Shkārat Msaied continued as a research project with graduate students until the present (Jensen et al. 2005; Hermansen et al. 2006; Kinzel et al. 2010; Kinzel 2019). Between 2003 and 2005, the work was supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation. Works in 2007, 2010, and 2014 to 2016 were supported by grants from the Danish Institute in Damascus, the Danish Palestine Foundation, and the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (ToRS), University of Copenhagen. During the field school, the team stayed in tents on site and shared a house in Beidha. In the years after, we shared a dig house in Beidha with the German research society ex oriente e.V. – working at Neolithic Ba’ja – and stayed at the Al Anbat Hotel in Wadi Musa.

ON THE APPEARANCE OF PROTAGONISTS

To depict Neolithic people is difficult given that little is known about their appearance. It has not been possible to trace the skin colour, hair, and eye colour yet due to the often poor preservation of the surviving bone material. Furthermore, the bone material is unfortunately not preserved well enough to enable the extraction of collagen necessary to analyse the genetic information. The lack of DNA material has reduced what we know about the actual appearance of the inhabitants at Shkārat Msaied. The skin colour and appearance of hair and eye colour as presented in the graphic novel, are speculative. We discussed whether to use black and white images for the Neolithic storyline and colours for the archaeologists in order to avoid the colour debate but realised that we would actually only have skirted the debate as shading for the skin would still have been needed. The darker shade, which we finally decided on using, reflects the idea that Neolithic communities led a predominantly outdoor life, which would have led to prolonged exposure to sunlight.

The human bone material suggests that there was a large variety in shape and height within the population. In one of the burials (Locus 80316), we had one very large male (partially decomposed when buried) who measured approximately 173–179 cm. Other long bones of males indicate a slightly lower height at around 164–170 cm. Females were about 10 cm shorter than the males (152–158 cm). The people appeared to have been quite muscular, perhaps even bulky. Some bones had marked muscle attachments, meaning that they were muscularly built, and although we were not able to establish the sex, they were most probably from males. Some had degenerative changes in their neck or lower back. The changes in the neck may stem from carrying stuff on their head; but it could also be just normal changes that come with age. Some smaller changes in the finger bones, possibly due to age, are visible as well. Many of the excavated individuals displayed quite heavy dental wear and it seems that they used their teeth as tools, although there was no clear evidence what these tasks may have been. The health condition of the Neolithic people at Shkārat Msaied was, according to Marie Louise Jørkov, our forensic anthropologist, ‘not ideal’ as the bones from some individuals show traces of malnutrition.

It is possible to draw some inspiration from the plastered skulls found at several Neolithic sites, e.g. Jericho (Kenyon 1953) and ‘Ain Ghazal (Schmandt-Besserat 2013), which may provide hints regarding possible haircuts. Furthermore, the human statues found at ‘Ain Ghazal show traces of what may be interpreted as body painting. A statue found at Jericho has some red lines suggesting a haircut, which we decided to use for the group staying at Shkārat Msaied. The Nahal Hemar skull (Bar-Yosef 1985) features a hairnet or afro style haircut (Fig. 5). This net-like hairstyle can be found as well on the so-called Nevali Çori-‘totem pole’ (Hauptmann 2011). This hairdo is somehow unique and seems to denote a ‘special’ person that could perhaps be associated with the role we had envisioned for our main character. Therefore, we decided to present this net-like hairstyle as a shaved haircut for our female main character. We debated if the other people should be left bald to avoid the haircut debate, but how would we then deal with other aspects where the evidence is limited? Would the people consequently run around naked only because we have no evidence for clothing? Clothing is one of the most difficult aspects when it comes to the graphics as they were made from perishable materials that do not survive in the archaeological record (Walter 2009; Grömer 2010).

Clothing was probably made from materials such as skin, leather, fur, wool, and maybe even linen. We decided on clothing that would reflect the seasons, the weather, and the activities being undertaken. In a way we had the challenge of finding a balance between nudity and textiles; between artistic imagination and scientific facts. Some might argue that it would be more suitable to show the Neolithic people with bodies showing traces of emaciation and starvation and women with sagging breasts. On the other hand, it is also difficult to say if we actually show too little nudity to meet the Neolithic reality (see Schrenk 2009; Siennicka et al. 2018; Levy 2020).

The case of the iceman ’Ötzi’, although younger in date than Shkārat Msaied, shows nicely that Neolithic people had developed a very distinct use of skins and fibres (Fleckinger 2007; Sulzbacher 2008). The clothing is far from primitive and actually quite elaborated and well-adapted to the climatic conditions and to functionality. However, for PPNB Shkārat Msaied most thoughts regarding clothing are currently highly speculative. The presence of bone tools, such as awls and needles, suggests that at least skin and fur were being processed (Stordeur 1988). The presence of wings bones from birds suggests perhaps that feathers were used as decoration as well (Bangsgaard 2003).

ON ARCHITECTURE

The architecture at Shkārat Msaied follows the architectural tradition of earlier periods. Due to the mountain setting, some architectural developments obviously took place later here than at other settlements. On the other hand, you could also say that there may not have been an immediate need for change. As the studies by Moritz Kinzel (2013), who specialises in building archaeology, have shown, there are at least five building phases and complex modifications of the buildings having taken place. The architecture has been extensively studied, but there are always aspects of the building and maintenance processes that remain obscure.

In general, the buildings at Shkārat Msaied are single-roomed roundhouse structures with flat roofs. Similar houses have been excavated at the nearby contemporaneous site of Beidha (Byrd 2005). The roundhouse structure that is constructed in the story is a generic and idealised building that incorporates various elements of the architecture found at Shkārat Msaied (P.35-39). The double-faced stone walls were constructed around a wooden scaffold, which carried the earthen roof. Wall stones were set into a mud mortar, which contained re-used plaster fragments, bone fragments, and plant remains. The house structures were between three and seven metres in diameter and the interior spaces were on average about 2.20 metres high (Kinzel 2013; 2019). According to the finds from building Unit K, the roofs appear to have been flat earthen roofs. Much of daily life took place on the roofs and they served as one of the main activity areas within the settlement. Heavy ground stone tools, fireplaces, and flint tool workshops were found here. The interiors were relatively dark, and the only light source may have been the entrance and some small openings in the roofs. However, one concept of early architecture seems to be that (sun) light was excluded from the interior. It was a dim, closed space that kept out the bright light of the sun. We have found no evidence of lamps so far, although some flint ‘bowl-lets’ may be interpreted as such (Wilke et al. 2014). The interior of a typical house at Shkārat Msaied had a fine lime plaster floor. These floors are in general white-grey in colour, although a red-pigmented floor was found in Unit C. Set into the plaster floor in front of and aligned along the axis of the entrance was a depression with a raised rim of unknown function. On the right-hand side when entering a building was a built-in feature: a stone box, a platform, a vertically placed, colourful sandstone slab, or a combination of these three features. Interior wall faces were plastered with mud or lime plaster. The evidence for exterior wall plaster is less clear.

Some of the interiors of the round structures had been modified over time into rectangular spaces. This transformation took place only internally. The full modification into rectangular buildings has not been recorded at Shkārat Msaied yet, but at nearby Beidha, which was excavated by Diana Kirkbride-Helbæk (Kirkbride 1966; Byrd 2005). The transformation from round to rectangular architecture is presented in the story by two children discussing and sketching different ground plans as have been documented at various Neolithic sites, e.g. Jerf el-Ahmar in Syria (Stordeur 2015) and Aşıklı in Central Anatolia/Turkey (Özbaşaran et al. 2018).

The endurance of the right angle in architecture after its introduction is represented in the story by the envisioned Late PPNB settlement of Ba’ja, another Neolithic site in the Petra-Mountains (see Kinzel 2013), and the sketched ground plans of the Minoan labyrinth, the Palladian Villa Rotonda, and Mies Van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion on page 40.

ON FOOD PRODUCTION AND MEALS – PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Research on Neolithic and Palaeolithic food has a long tradition, but only with the recent introduction of use-wear analyses of ground stone tools and lithics to the study of Near Eastern archaeological material, we started to gain more valuable insights into past culinary customs. In the earlier days of archaeology, all finds were washed and cleaned before any study of the material took place. This meant that most traces of residues were removed before the analysis occurred, making it impossible to find traces of plant or animal remains. New analyses of phytoliths and proteins provide a more nuanced view of Neolithic nutrition (see P.56; Arranz Otaegui et al. 2018). The study of animal bone assemblages enables us to determine the number and species of animals that were consumed and, depending on the preservation of the bones, also the approximate age of the hunted game (Peters et al. 2012; Yeomans et al. 2017). Shkārat Msaied is a particularly interesting site when it comes to the transition from hunting and gathering to a herding- and farming-oriented lifestyle.

For her PhD, Pia Wistoft Nielsen is investigating the differences between herded animals that are still morphologically wild and those that are domesticated by looking at morphological changes over time in the animal bone assemblages found at Neolithic settlements. These changes developed over several generations before they manifested themselves in the archaeological data, and Shkārat Msaied falls within this transitional phase. Up to 80 % of the animal bones found at Shkārat Msaied are of goat, gazelle, and sheep. Goat dominates the faunal assemblage by far. Since the Petra area was a natural habitat for goats in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic, there are several challenges that make it difficult to establish whether the goats from Shkārat Msaied were wild and hunted or managed in some way (see P. 44 & 56). Both the ibex and the bezoar goat lived in the area; the bezoar is the wild progenitor of the domesticated goat, whereas the ibex does not seem to have been herded. The only way to differentiate between the two species is by analysing the horn cores and not the bones.

Since the differentiation between the two species is still a challenge and complicates the analysis, we are left with little knowledge concerning the ratio of ibex and bezoar goats at the site. What we do know from the few horn cores that have been preserved, however, is that both ibex and bezoar goats were brought to and processed at Shkārat Msaied. One of the main questions for the study of the animal bones is whether goats might have been in the early stages of domestication at Shkārat Msaied. Unfortunately, given the fragile state of the bones and the sometimes impossible task of determining the species, this is still an unanswered question. What is obvious is that animals of various size and age were butchered at the site.

Mette Marie Hald’s study of the botanical remains found at Shkārat Msaied suggests that the environment was more humid during the Neolithic than today. Especially the presence of some species of short-lived plants suggests this. The mountains were characterised by so-called open forests with stone oak, pistachio, and juniper trees. The denser tree cover may have been responsible for a low rate of erosion and higher degree of humidity. Some of the deep cut valleys and cliffs we see today were less steep and deep 10.000 years ago. In the graphic novel this denser tree cover is shown. The diversity of trees and plants is less visible in the story and not depicted in detail. This is intentional as research is still pending and we only have a very narrow window into the Neolithic flora so far. Studying archaeobotanical remains is one way that archaeologists investigate ancient food. The botanical material from Shkārat Msaied that has been analysed contained only a few species that could have been eaten, including emmer wheat and wild pistachio.

In addition, the presence of ground stone tools such as grinders and pounders suggests that these plants were processed further to serve as food (Harpelund 2011). In contrast to the relatively poor conservation of organic materials at Shkārat Msaied, objects made of non-organic materials, such as stone, are much better preserved. The raw material used to make flint tools came, according to Christoph Purschwitz (2017), not from the local sources in the immediate surroundings of the site. It was most probably collected from a site located at around 13 walking hours in distance from Shkārat Msaied, around the Neolithic flint mining field of, for example, Har Gevim (Gopher-Barkai 2011) on the western side of Wadi Araba. The tools were then produced at Shkārat Msaied by the individual households.

Gebel (1988) has written that nowadays there are no permanent springs within two walking hours of the site, although it is likely that there was a water source closer-by during the Neolithic. Still today, water can be found when one digs into the gravel beds of the wadi. It can be assumed that the water table was slightly higher during the Neolithic and that there was a spring close by. The area north of Shkārat Msaied has not been fully surveyed yet and may offer alternative explanations for where the inhabitants at the site collected their water. Natural cisterns have been found in the rock formations north of the settlement, which were heavily extended in Nabatean times (ca. 150 BCE to 105 CE).

BEADS AND TOOLS

With regard to other aspects of daily life in the Neolithic village of Shkārat Msaied, the excavations have revealed that some people at the site were engaged in the production of personal ornamentation such as beads. These beads were made from marine shells and a variety of stones. Most of the stone beads were made from greenstone, which appears to be either turquoise or malachite. Turquoise and malachite were also recovered as tiny fragments that probably represent the raw material or debitage from the production process. The nearest source for these greenstones would have been the Wadi Faynan/Wadi Fidan area, located about 25 km north of the settlement, or they might have come from the Sinai or the Negev desert. Roughouts of sandstone that represent unfinished beads were also recovered from the site. In the northern part of the excavation, two concentrations of flint drills have been found – as well as fragments of beads – together with debitage from the production of personal ornaments. Such drills were used in the production of flint tools and beads of different materials. These clusters attest to bead production within the settlement and have been interpreted as debris that might have been brushed off the roofs, which are assumed to have been the main activity areas within the settlement.

The most common type of bead was disc beads, but barrel beads, pendants, and one-cylinder beads were also found. This is probably because disc beads require fewer manufacturing steps and can be produced en masse. In Unit F, one large greenstone bead (Obj. 81311), possibly made of the mineral chrysoprase or chalcedony, was found in the fill of an almost empty burial cist (Loc. 80214), as depicted in the graphic novel. The burial cist contained only a few human and animal bone fragments. The greenstone bead surface was nicely polished and translucent. It measures 60.7 mm in length, 54.1 mm in width, and is 31.3 mm thick. The bead was longitudinally pierced with an 11.8 to 12.9 mm wide cylindrical shaft. The fact that it was found in the burial cist suggests that it was left there as part of a funerary rite.

Given the high density of finds related to bead production but low number of finished products found at the site, it has been suggested that the beads were utilised primarily outside the settlement as trade goods. Another reason why there is a lack of finished beads could be that people valued them highly and therefore took them along when they left the site; the blocked doorways (P.14 & 48) may attest to the settlement having been abandoned. Some scholars have suggested that the preference for greenstone, which is also apparent at other Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites in the Levant, indicates that this material probably had an embedded or symbolic meaning relating to vegetation and fertility (see Bar-Yosef Mayer & Porat 2008); however, this remains highly speculative. The bead manufacturing sequence presented on page 23 in the graphic novel is based on Roseleen Bains’s (2012) work on the stone beads from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (Turkey), and on experiments executed by Mette Bangsborg Thuesen (Thuesen & Kinzel 2018).

The vast majority of stone beads from Shkārat Msaied had evidence of bi-conical drilling, which means that the roughouts were drilled in a cone shape from both sides. Production marks from the polishing and the abrasion process were also visible, which are probably the result of ground stone tools being used to steady the beads during drilling and surface reduction.

More than one thousand ground stones were found during the excavation at Shkārat Msaied. Anne Mette Harpelund (2011) has divided these into twelve main categories depending on their shape and function. Ground stone tools constitute by far the largest assemblage at the site. The ground stone tools were probably used in different aspects of daily life, such as food preparation and processing, pigment processing, tool manufacturing and maintenance, plaster production as well as activities related to ceremonial events.

In: Godtfredsen & Kinzel 2020: 60-71.