Atlit-Yam, a Submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic C Site off the Carmel Coast, Israel

This book focuses on the submerged Pre-Pottery Neolithic C settlement of Atlit-Yam (dated to the end of the tenth millennium to end of the ninth millennium BP). Located off the Carmel coast of Israel, it is the earliest and best preserved of 23 submerged prehistoric in situ sites known off the Israeli Mediterranean Sea coast. The site is a unique underwater archaeological locality due to the extensive investigations that have been undertaken and which have exposed a large area comprising a range of architectural features, as well as the broad spectrum, richness and excellent preservation of the finds. The site offers insights into the processes of settlement inundation, which is relevant to sea-level rise nowadays, as well as the circumstances of survival and discovery of submerged sites worldwide.

The chapters in this volume, the first of two, presents aspects of the Atlit-Yam site, including the site’s archaeological and physical setting and aspects its material culture (architecture, burials, groundstone and lithic artefacts). These data sets are used to reconstruct aspects of the technology and lifestyle of the community that inhabited it and highlights similarities to contemporaneous sites in the hinterland. The second volume, will deal with the economy, diet and health status of the inhabitants, the site’s chronology, and reconstructed paleoenvironment including the geological and geomorphological setting of the site assessed in relation to sea-level rise.

This book fills gaps in our knowledge of the coastal Neolithic of the Southern Levant, by providing an in-depth review of the archaeological remains discovered at this unique, submerged site.