Insights into the economic organization of the Phoenician homeland: a multidisciplinary investigation of the later Iron Age II and Persian period Phoenician amphorae from Tell el-Burak This paper details the results of a large-scale multidisciplinary analysis of Iron Age pottery from a settlement in the core of the Phoenician homeland. The research presented centres on a large corpus of Phoenician carinated-shoulder amphorae (CSA) from the later Iron Age II and Persian period contexts at the coastal site of Tell el-Burak. Traditional typological investigations are combined with a focused archaeometric approach including a new quantitative method for the morphometric analysis of amphorae, thin-section petrography, geochemistry and organic residue analyses, aimed at gaining a more detailed understanding of the organisation of the Phoenician economy. Despite gradual, but marked typological changes, very little change in the fabrics of these amphorae was noted over the 400 year Iron Age occupation of the site. The research, thus, demonstrates that the production of the Iron Age amphorae from Tell el-Burak was highly organised and was undertaken by long-lived, sustained and centralized modes. The establishment of Tell el-Burak and this new pottery industry coincides with the proliferation of the world's first great imperial powers, the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Persian empires and the outcomes of this research provide new insights into socioeconomic strategies adopted in the Phoenician homeland during this pivotal time.

This paper presents a new rapid, low-cost method for the large-scale documentation of pottery sherds through simultaneous multiple 3D model capture using Structure from Motion (SfM). The method has great potential to enhance and replace time-consuming and expensive conventional approaches for pottery documentation, i.e., 2D photographs and drawing on paper with subsequent digitization of the drawings. To showcase the method’s effectiveness and applicability, a case study was developed in the context of an investigation of the Phoenician economy at the Lebanese site of Tell el-Burak, which is based on a large collection of amphora sherds. The same set of sherds were drawn by an experienced draftsperson and then documented through SfM using our new workflow to allow for a direct comparison. The results show that the new technique detailed here is accessible, more cost-effective, and allows for the documentation of ceramic data at a far-greater scale, while producing more consistent and reproducible results. We expect that these factors will enable excavators to greatly increase digital access to their material, which will significantly enhance its utility for subsequent research.

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