The settlement at 'Ain Ghazal ("Spring of the Gazelles") near the modern city of Amman was occupied from the Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (MPPNB ) - ca 8300 - 7550 BC. The settlement plannig a large number of rectangular buildings consisting of few rooms with plastered floors grouped in three districts, resulted undobtedly from well structured social organisation. The excavations revealed that it was a major art production centre. It was a large settlement of farmers, herders, and hunters and was continuously inhabited from approximately 7 250 – 5 000 BC. Evidence of animal bones at the site indicates that the inhabitants domesticated sheep in the LPPNB, pigs in the PPNC and later cattle. They grew also different crops (lentils, barley, cheakpeas, peas). Their deaths they burried under the floor of house or in a courtyard, but infants.
Sources:
- Piotr Bienkowski , Jordan: Crossroads of the Near East in: Treasures from an Ancient Land: The Art of Jordan, Piotr Bienkowski eds., Stroud, UK: Alan Sutton 1991, p. 4
- Fawzi Zayadine, Sculpture in Ancient Jordan, in: Treasures from an Ancient Land: The Art ofJordan, ed. Piotr Bienkowski,. Stroud, UK: Alan Sutton 1991, pp.31-61
- Garry A. Rollefson, Neolithic 'Ain Ghazal (Jordan) : Ritual and Ceremony, II, Paléorient 12/1, 1986, pp. 45-52
- Denise Schmandt-Besserat: “ʿAin Ghazal ‘Monumental’ Figures.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 310, 1998, pp. 1–17.
