Four Decades of Intensifed Neolithic Research in Jordan Gary O. Rollefson Volume 31.1 Summer 2019 Late Neolithic (ca. 5400 B.C.) shepherd’s hut built of basalt slabs at the southern base of Mesa 4 (“Maitland’s Mesa”), Wadi al-Qataf. Mesa 1 is in the background (all photos and images courtesy of Gary Rollefson, unless otherwise noted). When I frst came to Jordan in 1978, it was as a young(er) post-doc with ambitions to explore the oldest evidence of human presence in the Kingdom: the study of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic periods ranging from 1.5 million to about 40,000 years ago, which had been only recently explored with any depth in Azraq in the eastern part of the country and in the Wadi Hisma area just north of Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, and I was eager to join in the efort. Tree years later following an excavation season at Lion Spring at the southern edge of South Azraq, I returned to ACOR just in time to atend a reception following one of ACOR’s presentations on Jordanian archaeology. Among the people atending the lecture was Professor Khair Yassine from the University of Jordan, who was the director of the Tell al-Mazar project that mostly treated the Iron Age, but he was a polymath when it came to archaeology. Khair asked me if I might be interested in looking at a lithic scater on the outskirts of Amman, and of course I accepted his invitation to travel to the site the following week. Te site turned out to be ‘Ain Ghazal—a lithic scater, indeed.