Comment on ‘Purpose, Permanence, and Perception of 14,000-Year-Old Architecture: Contextual Taphonomy of Food Refuse’, by Reuven Yeshurun, Guy Bar-Oz, Daniel Kaufman, and Mina Weinstein-Evron

This paper aims to demonstrate how careful and detailed intra - site analyses of refuse and refuse contexts associated with buildings provide a more useful tool for understanding practice than do analyses of the stru ctures alone. As the authors are well aware a comparable approach was taken by Lewis Binford some thirty years ago , so studies of the Epipaleolithic - Neolithic Near East have been slow to engage with this scholarship. More specific objectives of this paper, though, are to demonstrate that animal bone taphonomies and their sequential contexts can be used to differentiate between short - term and long - term occupation in Natufian structures, and also to identify their communal o r residential use. Fundamental to a study that concerns more consumption - oriented approaches to lived space are four levels of analyses. These consist of: detailed analyses of artefact taphonomies; detailed context ual analyses ; analyses of artefact assemblage patterning ; and approaches to t he use of space. Here I use the term ‘artefact’ to include faunal remains as the refuse of human action. [Opening paragraph]