Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jasrep New insights into livestock management and domestication at Tel Ro'im West, a multi-layer Neolithic site in the Upper Jordan Valley, Israel Nuha Agha, Dani Nadel ⁎ , Guy Bar-Oz Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Livestock domestication Neolithic Jordan Valley ABSTRACT The issues of exactly when, where and how many times were farm animals (goat, sheep, pigs and cattle) do- mesticated in the Near East have been addressed for decades, using archaeological data, the frequencies of hunted and managed ungulates, bone measurements and DNA studies. In most Neolithic sites in the southern Levant, a stratified PPNB – PN sequence representing the relevant time period and direct evidence for the management and domestication phases of goats, sheep, pigs and cattle was not found or studied. The site of Tel Roʻim West (TRW) in the northern Jordan Valley encompasses such a sequence and is used here as a case study for characterizing the local trajectory leading from hunting to livestock husbandry. Our results indicate that the spatial spread and diffusion of sheep husbandry from the north to the southern Levant was via the Levantine corridor through settled land, rather than through the more arid zones to the east. In the PPNC most of the goats at the site were domesticated or at least were at a high level of cultural control. Cattle underwent a slow process of diminution. The pigs from PPNC and PN TRW were already about the size of domesticated pigs. Thus, the faunal composition of TRW reflects both change and continuity in the exploitation patterns over time. The change is apparent in the transition from the PPNB to the PPNC, when hunting became a secondary component in the subsistence economy. Continuity is evident in the gradual and long process of domesticating cattle and pigs during the PPNC and the PN. Continuity is also evident in the livestock composition at the nearby Hula valley sites, which remained largely unchanged from the Neolithic times onward. 1. Introduction During the first half of the Holocene profound changes took place in the ever-evolving Neolithic communities of Southwest Asia. Since the establishment of the first villages of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA: 11,600–10,600 cal. BP; Table 1) through the various phases of the PPNB and PPNC (10,600–8350 cal. BP) and ending in the Pottery Neolithic (PN: 8350–7450 cal. BP), the scale of inventions in general, and in the management and consequently the domestication of plants and animals in particular, has accelerated and had a profound and seemingly irreversible impact on the course of cultural evolution (Bar- Yosef and Meadow, 1995; Cauvin, 2000; Twiss, 2007; Zeder, 2008a; Zeder, 2011). However, although the issues of when, where and how many times were selected species of plants and animals managed and domesticated have been addressed for more than a century now, the pendulum is still swinging as the data accumulate and are re- interpreted. In most Neolithic sites in the southern Levant, a stratified PPNB-PN sequence representing the management and domestication phases of goats, sheep, pigs and cattle was not found or studied. The site of Tel Roʻim West (TRW) in the northern Jordan Valley encompasses such a sequence and is used here as a case study for characterizing the local process of shifting from hunting ungulates to culling and domes- ticating livestock. The center of domestication of the four main livestock animals, goat (Capra hircus), sheep (Ovis aries), pig (Sus scrofa) and cattle (Bos taurus) was in the northern Levant and Anatolia, where the progenitor species of these domesticated animals were distributed. Yet, the exact location of domestication as well as the timing and the scale of this transition remain unclear and it is still at the focus of extensive research (Larson and Fuller, 2014; Larson et al., 2014; Stépanoff and Vigne, 2018). Furthermore, it is a matter of controversy whether these animals were domesticated once and in one center only, or simultaneously from po- pulations of local wild species in their original natural habitats. Some claim that animal domestication also took place in the southern Levant, albeit at a different pace and magnitude (e.g., Davis, 1981; Grigson, 1989; Haber and Dayan, 2004; Horwitz, 2003b; Marom and Bar-Oz, 2009; Marom and Bar-Oz, 2013). The southern Levant has traditionally been at the heart of https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2019.101991 Received 25 May 2019; Received in revised form 14 August 2019; Accepted 14 August 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: dnadel@research.haifa.ac.il (D. Nadel). Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 27 (2019) 101991 2352-409X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T