Introduction: The Potential of Ground Stone Studies

This chapter discusses the ground stone artifacts as craft items and describes the roles played by ground stone artifacts in the development of other Neolithic crafts. It explores chanes opratoires in the production of ground stone artifacts and explains variations in the ways in which ground stone technologies were organized in settlement systems. The chapter also discusses these issues and illustrates them by reference to several Neolithic sites in western Asia with distinctively different ground stone assemblages. Ground stone assemblages also need to be studied in terms of whole systems of organization of such artifacts, from raw material procurement to final abandonment Jilat 7 dates to the Early and Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB), broadly contemporary with Beidha. It is one of a number of early Neolithic sites in the arid eastern Jordanian desert, excavated by Andrew Garrard in the 1980s.