Lab Director Natalie Munro has spent much of her career analyzing fauna from Natufian sites in Israel. This includes her dissertation site, Hayonim Cave^1,2 (excavated by Ofer Bar-Yosef), François Valla’s excavations at Hayonim Terrace, the small burial cave of Hilazon Tachtit Cave^3,4,5,6 (excavated by Leore Grosman) and currently the sites of Nahal Ein Gev II^7,8 (also directed by Grosman) and Jordan River Dureijat^9,10 (directed by Gonen Sharon). As part of these projects, Munro has applied a behavioral ecological theoretical approach to argue that animal domestication emerged out of an intensive hunting background linked to local, density-dependent demographic factors.

Citations

1. Munro, N.D. 2004. Zooarchaeological measures of hunting pressure and occupation intensity in the Natufian: implications for agricultural origins. Current Anthropology 45:S5-S33.

2. Stiner, M.C., N.D. Munro, and T.A. Surovell. 2000. The tortoise and the hare: small game use, the Broad Spectrum Revolution and Paleolithic demography. Current Anthropology 41(1): 39-73.

3. Goldgeier, H., N.D. Munro and L. Grosman. 2019. Remembering a sacred place–the depositional history of Hilazon Tachtit, a Natufian burial cave. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 56:101111.

4. Grosman, L.G. and N.D. Munro. 2016. A Natufian ritual event. Current Anthropology 57(3): 311-331.

5. >Munro, N.D. and L. Grosman. 2010. Early evidence (12,000 BP) for feasting at a burial cave in Israel. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107(35):15362-15366.

6. Grosman, L, N.D. Munro and A. Belfer-Cohen. 2008. A 12,000 year old burial from the southern Levant (Israel): a case for early shamanism. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 105(46): 17665-17669

7. Munro, N.D., Petrillo, A.N. and Grosman, L., 2021. Specialized aquatic resource exploitation at the Late Natufian site of Nahal Ein Gev II, Israel. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 13(1): 1-15.

8. Grosman L, Munro ND, Abadi I, Boaretto E, Shaham D, Belfer-Cohen A, Bar-Yosef, O. 2016. Nahal Ein Gev II, a Late Natufian Community at the Sea of Galilee. PLoS ONE 11(1): e0146647. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0146647.

9. Pedergnana, A., Cristiani, E., Munro, N., Valletta, F. and Sharon, G., 2021. Early line and hook fishing at the Epipaleolithic site of Jordan River Dureijat (Northern Israel). PloS one, 16(10), p.e0257710.

10. Sharon, G., L. Grosman, E. Allué, A. Barash, D.E. Bar-Yosef Mayer, R. Biton, E.J. Bunin, D. Langgut, Y. Melamed, S. Mischke, F. Valleta, and N.D. Munro. 2020. Jordan River Dureijat: 10,000 Years of Intermittent Epipaleolithic Activity on the Shore of Paleolake Hula. PaleoAnthropology pp. 34-64. doi:10.4207/PA.2020.ART141

Munro’s projects on the emergence of animal domestication investigate new interactions between humans and animals in collaboration with colleagues (Mary Stiner, Guy Bar-Oz, Reuven Yeshurun and others) in both the southern Levant and Central Anatolia. These projects provide evidence for the in situ emergence of animal management and attest to local experimentation with animals in diverse regions within Southwest Asia.

In collaboration with Mary Stiner, Munro is part of the team working at the early Neolithic sites of Aşıklı Höyük^1,2 (directed by Mihriban Özbaşaran and Güneş Duru) and Balıklı in Kapadokya, Turkey. By combining evidence from the relative abundance of different types of animals and their mortality profiles with research on animal dung and urine, animal pathologies and the architectural layout undertaken by other team members, they have documented a clear trajectory from the exploitation of wild to managed sheep over the course of about 1,000 years of occupation.

In the southern Levant, Munro investigates the emergence of animal management³ in collaboration with Lidar Sapir-Hen and Jackie Meier to examine the local emergence of goat management at the Early and Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic sites of Yiftah’el⁴ (directed by Hamoudi Khalaily and Ianir Milevski) and Kfar ha Horesh^5,6,7 (directed by Nigel Goring-Morris) to detect changes in the human relationship with goat, pig, and cattle, animals which were later domesticated.

Citations

1. Stiner, M.C., Munro, N.D., Buitenhuis, H., Duru, G. and Özbaşaran, M., 2022. An endemic pathway to sheep and goat domestication at Aşıklı Höyük (Central Anatolia, Turkey). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(4). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2110930119

2. Stiner, M.C, H. Buitenhuis, G. Duru, S.L. Kuhn, S.M Mentzer, N.D. Munro, N. Pollath, J. Quade, G. Tsartsidou and M. Ozbaşaran. 2014. A forager–herder trade-off, from broad-spectrum hunting to sheep management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (23): 8404-8409.

3. Munro, N.D, G Bar-Oz, JM Meier, L. Sapir-Hen, MC Stiner, R. Yeshurun. 2018. The emergence of animal management in the southern Levant. Scientific Reports 8:9279; DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-27647-z.

4. Sapir-Hen, L, T. Dayan, H. Khalaily and N.D. Munro. 2016. Human Hunting and Nascent Animal Management at Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic Yiftah'el, Israel. PLoS ONE 11(7): e0156964. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0156964

5. Meier, J.M., N. Goring-Morris and N.D. Munro. 2017. Aurochs bone deposits at Kfar HaHoresh and the southern Levant across the agricultural transition (22,000–8,350 cal. BP). Antiquity 91(360):1469-1483.

6. Meier, J.M., N. Goring-Morris and N.D. Munro. 2017. Depositional Histories of Faunal Remains from the Neolithic Cultic Site of Kfar HaHoresh, Israel. Journal of Archaeological Anthropology 48:233-249.

7. Meier, J.M., N.Goring-Morris and N.D. Munro. 2016. Provisioning the Ritual Neolithic Site of Kfar HaHoresh, Israel at the Dawn of Animal Management. PLoS ONE 11(11): e0166573. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0166573.

Finally, in collaboration with Mary Stiner, Munro analyzed a large assemblage of fauna originating from the Upper Paleolithic through the Neolithic periods from the remarkable site of Franchthi Cave^1,2,3 in the Peloponnese of Greece. As part of this project they documented evidence for increased site intensity alongside an expansion in dietary breadth first in the terrestrial and then in the aquatic game component culminating in the Mesolithic period. Franchthi Cave also includes an intact Mesolithic-Neolithic sequence which enabled them to capture the rapid and early spread of agriculture to this locale early in the Neolithic period.

Citations

1. Munro, N.D. and M.C. Stiner. 2020. A zooarchaeological history of the Neolithic occupations at Franchthi Cave and paralia in southern Greece. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 58:101162.

2. Munro, N.D. and M.C. Stiner. 2015. Zooarchaeological evidence for Early Neolithic colonization at Franchthi Cave (Peloponnese, Greece). Current Anthropology 56(4): 596-603.

3. Stiner, M.C. and N.D. Munro. 2011. On the Evolution of Diet and Landscape during the Upper Paleolithic through Mesolithic at Franchthi Cave (Peloponnese, Greece). Journal of Human Evolution 60(5):618-636.