Pottery Neolithic landscape modification at Dhra’ Ian Kuijt 1 , Bill Finlayson 2 & Jode MacKay 3 This report of the discovery of low walls running across the slopes east of the Dead Sea presents an important landmark in the history of farming, for these were terrace walls put in place to conserve soil and control water around 6 000 cal BC. The authors point to some of the implications of what they see as early landscape modification at the scale of a small community or household. Keywords: West Asia, Near East, Dead Sea, Jordan, Neolithic, PN, PPNC † , agriculture, farming, irrigation Introduction Recent research by anthropologists, economists and geographers has focused new attention on the extent to which early small-scale societies modified the landscape around them (Smith & Wishnie 2000; Terrell et al. 2003). It is argued that there is, in general, a qualitative and quantitative change in the nature of this modification during the transition from hunter-gatherer to farming societies, and that this occurred widely across both time and space (e.g. Knapp & Ashmore 1999). From a social perspective, this process has been viewed as a means of domesticating the environment and, certainly in North-west Europe, landscape modification has become an accepted fact of early Neolithic life, mostly revealed in the creation of landscapes through ritual practice (Bradley 1998). From the alternative perspective of human ecology, ecosystem engineering is seen as a more practical development. Modification of, and interaction with, the local landscape includes such things as the clearing of forested areas, the construction of fields and pastures and the construction of irrigation systems, all with the intention of engineering new, or modifying existing, ecosystems (Smith & Wishnie 2000). People often modify the landscape with the intention of increasing the growth of plant resources as well as of reducing its variability between growing years. The labour and time outlay varies depending upon the task involved. For example, constructing terrace walls usually requires much more time than land clearance or spreading fertilizer. In these cases, however, it is clear that there are practical reasons for the investment of time, labour, and resources and that there would have been a positive return. How rapidly that return † For those unfamiliar with Near Eastern (West Asian) terminology, ‘Pottery Neolithic’ in this article is the pottery- using Neolithic period (PN), as opposed to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) and its subdivisions PPNA, PPNB, PPNC. 1 Department of Anthropology, The University of Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA 2 Council for British Research in the Levant, P.O. Box 519, Jubaiha, Amman, 11941, Jordan 3 Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary, Canada Received: 8 December 2005; Accepted: 26 May 2006; Revised: 19 June 2006 antiquity 81 (2007): 106–118 106