INTRODUCTION

As noted earlier, Southwest and Central Asia have rain in winter and spring that is derived from westerly winds from the Mediterranean and Black Sea, with hot, dry summers and cool/cold, moist winters (Chapters 3 and 7). Most of this region is today arid or semiarid, and is therefore vulnerable to any reductions in effective rainfall if these winds are blocked or reduced. Much of it is now desert (Table 7.1 and Figure 7.10), particularly inland from the Levantine coast. Almost all the archaeological evidence from the Southwest Asian Middle Pleistocene comes from the Levant (Israel, Lebanon, and western Syria), which has a rich record, with arguably the earliest evidence for symbolic representation, fire, plant processing, hunting, blade assemblages, and lithic assemblages specific to a particular region. There are two reasons that so much more is known about the Levant than inland regions. First, considerably more fieldwork has taken place in Israel than in neighbouring countries; and second, because of its higher rainfall, the Levant would have been a core area of settlement, with more continuous residence during glacial-interglacial cycles. Other “core” areas would probably have been western Turkey, the western Zagros Mountains, and the southern coast of the Caspian Sea.

This chapter has four sections. The first deals with excavated Middle Pleistocene, Lower Palaeolithic sites in the Levant (mostly with Acheulean assemblages).