Given that this series is held in honour of our late colleague Ofer Bar-Yosef, this contribution discusses how the Late Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic sites in the Qa’ Shubayqa fit into the social and cultural landscape of the Levant. It is done so on the basis of three concepts that Ofer has formulated or helped to formulate: the Natufian ‘core area’, the PPNA Levantine corridor and the PPNB interaction sphere. Taking these as a starting point, the paper explores the webs of social and cultural interaction the inhabitants of the Qa’ Shubayqa were incorporated into through Tim Ingold’s concept of the taskscape. As such, it considers the movement of people and materials through the landscape, their activities and interactions. The paper begins with some general comments on these concepts, then presents the sites and then attempts to reconstruct these taskscapes of interaction.

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Tobias Richter studied archaeology at the University of Wales Lampeter from where he obtained his BA in 2002. He was than a pre-doctoral research scholar at the Council for British Research in Amman, Jordan from 2002-2004. During the same period he worked on a research-based master’s degree at the University of Wales, which was completed in 2005. He was a PhD student the Institute of Archaeology at University College London from 2005-2009, supervised by Andrew Garrard and Louise Martin. For his PhD he investigated the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic settlement in the Azraq Oasis in eastern Jordan, as part of which he directed excavations at the site of Ayn Qasiyyah. In 2007, with Lisa Maher, he initiated new excavations at the Early Epipalaeolithic site Kharaneh IV, which he co-directed for 3 years. In 2009, he became the deputy director of the University of Copenhagen’s Qatar Islamic Archaeology and Heritage project and spend several years supervising excavations in northern Qatar. He was appointed assistant professor at the University of Copenhagen in 2010. In 2012, he left the Qatar project to launch fieldwork in the Qa’ Shubayqa. In 2014, he was promoted to Associate professor, and in 2015 launched the Tracking Cultural and Environmental Change project together with Hojjat Darabi and Peder Mortensen. This project focused on the re-excavation of a number of early Neolithic sites in the central Zagros.