Le nomadisme néolithique en zone steppique syrienne et les acteurs de sa découverte

Abstract

The current climate of the Near Eastern steppes was gradually put in place on the eve of the Neolithisation, around the 12th millennium BCE. The Syrian steppe was then travelled by mobile groups of hunter-gatherers belonging to the Natufian culture. In the steppe, their campsites can sometimes be simple hunting camps. These same groups also live in villages built on the outskirts of the steppe areas. This situation, which persists during the Neolithisation, gives rise to various development scenarios, but whose common element is a reference to the same symbolic world. By the 8th millennium BCE, the situation evolves, and the steppe is shared between fully sedentary cultures occupying favorable environments, nomadic pastoralist groups, and groups whose main activity seems to be hunting, mainly of gazelles. The Neolithisation can thus be perceived as much as a radical change in the occupation of the steppe as a simple adaptation to a new economy.But what exactly do we infer by Neolithic nomadism? A few stones, some ashes, flint and bone scatterings which are, in the best of cases, the only evidence of the seasonal campsites of these groups. More than anywhere else, the archaeology of nomads is an archaeology of absence. Campsites are ephemeral, but paradoxically the presence of the nomads has left indelible marks on the steppe. These traces are tangible, but they are also imaginary — in the mind of both the archaeologists and the Bedouins who participate to the excavations.