Ayn Ghazal

ʿAin Ghazal is one of the largest Early Neolithic sites in the ancient Near East, situated at the headwaters of the Zarqa River on the eastern outskirts of Amman. Occupied from around 7300 to 5000 BCE, the settlement covered roughly 15 hectares, making it unusually large for a society still transitioning from foraging to farming. Its greatest discovery came in 1983 when road construction workers uncovered a cache of roughly thirty life-sized plaster statues — among the oldest monumental human sculptures ever found. These so-called Ain Ghazal Statues, now housed in the Jordan Museum and the National Museum of Amman, have transformed scholarly understanding of early ritual and symbolic life. The physical site today is partly buried under a highway interchange, so the Jordan Museum provides the most accessible encounter with its legacy.