GP008-0012
The strength of the Earth’s magnetic field from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Jordan

Tuesday, 15 December 2020
Poster
Anita Di Chiara, National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, Rome, Italy, Lisa Tauxe, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States, Thomas Levy, University of California, San Diego, Levantine Archaeology and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory and Scripps Center for Marine Archaeology, San Diego, CA, United States, Mohammad Najjar, University of California, San Diego, Levantine Archaeology and Cyber-Archaeology Laboratory, La Jolla, United States, Fabio Florindo, INGV-ROME, Rome, Italy and Erez Ben-Yosef, Tel Aviv University, Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv, Israel
Abstract:
The southern Levant is archaeologically rich and well-studied, constituting an invaluable source for the study of the geomagnetic field. In this study, we investigate archaeological materials excavated from four Jordanian archaeological sites from the Wadi Faynan region: “Ghuweir 1” and Wadi Fidan sites 01, 61 and 51. Ages of the sites are assigned to the Pre-pottery Neolitic B and Pottery Neolithic period, about 7,700 to 6,000 years BCE. A total of 131 specimens A total of 131 specimens from Wadi Fidan 01 flint and pottery fragments from Ghuweir, Wadi Fidan 61, and 51 were subjected to absolute paleointensity analyses using the IZZI protocol. Eighty-nine specimens gave reliable results, passing the strict selection criteria, with a success rate of 67%, and were corrected for the cooling rate and the anisotropy. The data from Wadi Fidan 01, 61 and 51 compare well with the values predicted by the global geomagnetic models and the data from Northern Iraq (Nachasova & Burakov, 1995) and Syria (Gallet et al., 2015). The new data from Ghuweir site in Jordan constitute the oldest archeointensity data for the entire Levant, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and modern Europe to date. Together with the two previous studies, archeointensity data suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field in the Ancient Near East was at its weakest value over the last 10,000 years at around 7,700 years BCE, recovering its strength around 6,500 and gradually weakening again around 6,000.

The new data significantly enhance our understanding of the regional geomagnetic field variations and refine and extend further into the past the use of archeomagnetism as a robust and independent dating tool.

<< Previous Abstract | Next Abstract