Centered On the Wetlands: Integrating New Phytolith Evidence of Plant-Use from the 23,000-Year-Old Site of Ohalo II, Israel

Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers are often interpreted as playing an important role in the development of early cereal cultivation and subsequent farming economies in the Levant. This focus has come at the expense of understanding these people as resilient foragers who exploited a range of changing micro habitats through the Last Glacial Maximum. New phytolith data from Ohalo II seek to redress this. Ohalo II has the most comprehensive and important macrobotanical assemblage in Southwest Asia for the entire Epipaleolithic period. Here we present a phytolith investigation of 28 sediment samples to make three key contributions. First, by comparing the phytolith assemblage to a sample of the macrobotanical assemblage, we provide a baseline to help inform the interpretation of phytolith assemblages at other sites in Southwest Asia. Second, we highlight patterns of plant use at the site. We identify the importance of wetland plant resources to hut construction and provide evidence that supports previous work suggesting that grass and cereal processing may have been a largely indoor activity. Finally, drawing on ethnographic data from the American Great Basin, we reevaluate the significance of wetland plant resources for Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherers and argue that the wetland-centered lifeway at Ohalo II represents a wider Levantine adaptive strategy.