2022 Volume 57 Pages 3-20
In the southern Levant, a study region of this paper, chert (flint) is the main raw material of chipped stone artifacts, and the availability and variability of chert have been increasingly examined through surveys for chert outcrops. This paper reports the results of geological survey for chert sources near the Jebel Qalkha area located at the northwestern corner of the Hisma Basin in southern Jordan. Although chert outcrops are generally ubiquitous in the Levant, their occurrences are very limited in the Hisma Basin. However, previous and new surveys have discovered several chert sources near the Jebel Qalkha area. The paper describes three main areas with chert sources: Humayma, Abbasiyah, and Wadi Abu Sawwan. Each of them is small and occurs in isolation. Such sporadic distributions of smallscale sources characterize the chert occurrences in the western Hisma Basin. Although the areal extent of chert occurrence is limited in the Hisma Basin, our survey observed great variability of chert in visual attributes, such as shape, color, texture, and translucency. The exploitation of these local chert sources around Jebel Qalkha is indicated by the surface scatters of Paleolithic artifacts collected during the survey. Most noticeable artifacts were Levallois cores and blanks of the Middle Paleolithic, but we also found several blade/bladelet cores that are probably dated to the Upper Paleolithic and Epipaleolithic. Further studies are necessary to clarify the role of the local chert sources in the raw material provisioning strategies by prehistoric inhabitants in the western Hisma Basin.
