Nizzanim culture

The Nizzanim culture is a suggested archaeological culture from the Pottery Neolithic of the Southern Levant. It was identified in three sites in the southern coastal plain of modern Israel including the type site Nizzanim, Giv‘at Haparsa and Hof Zikim which were studied by Ya'akov Olami, Felix Burian, Erich Friedman, Shmuel Yeivin and Yosef Garfinkel. In those sites there were no architectural remains but pits and floor levels with hearths. These findings seem to represent a pastoral-nomadic population, similar to the precedeeing population of Pre-Pottery Neolithic Ashkelon and the Qatifian culture.[1] Garfinkel suggests that these settlement served as seasonal hunting or fishing campsites.[2]

Map of Pottery Neolithic in the Southern Levant in

  Yarmukian culture

  Lodian (Jericho IX) culture

  Nizzanim culture

The dating of the Nizzanim culture is unclear mainly because no stratigraphic relations with different periods have been observed. While Garfinkel suggests it coexisted with the Yarmukian and Lodian culture, Avi Gopher and Ram Gophna reject the sites as a distinct culture and consider it to be a variant of the Lodian culture. Only one proper radiocarbon date from the sites is available (5767–5541 BCE) but dates one of the sites to the time of the Wadi Raba culture (post-dating the Yarmukian and Lodian). This date contradicts the archaeological findings and most archaeologists agree that they represent the Pottery Neolithic (c. 6400 - 5800 BCE).[2]