Overview
'Ain Ghazal ("Spring of the Gazelle") occupies terraces above the Zarqa in northeast Amman. Gary O. Rollefson, Zeidan Kafafi, Alan Simmons and others excavated in the 1980s-1990s as highway construction threatened the mound. The settlement grew from a PPNB village around 7200 BCE to one of the largest sites in the southern Levant, perhaps 10-15 ha, before shrinking in the PPNC and Yarmukian.
In 1983 and 1985 caches of lime-plaster statues and busts were found in pits: modelled bodies, painted clothing, and eyes of bitumen with diene inlay. They stand about 0.5-1 m tall. Other pits held plastered skulls, as at Jericho. Rectangular houses, a cult building, and a long faunal record (including a shift from hunting to herding) make the site a demographic and ritual counterpart to Çatalhöyük, on a Levantine rather than Anatolian plateau.
The statues are in the Jordan Museum, Amman, and in other collections. The mound itself is an urban-edge archaeological park, not a reconstructed town.