Reconceptualizing the Early Bronze Age Southern Levant without Cities

Abstract

Traditionally, the Early Bronze Age (EBA) has been described as the first urban society in the southern Levant. In comparison to many other regions of the world, such as ancient Mesoamerica, North America, Europe, East Asia, and Mesopotamia, EBA society does not pass the ‘urban litmus test’. In this paper I argue that ultimately the EBA evidence does not fit standard definitions of urbanism because it lacks three key elements: scale of differentiation, increased localized diversity and coherence of identity, and a rural and urban dichotomy in lifeways. Instead, I suggest that we need to analyze and reconstruct EBA society in terms of its own regional, economic, political, and social context, and work to build new ways of understanding EBA society. From the standpoint of an anthropological archaeologist, I believe that people in the EBA were working towards a societal project, a cultural endeavor, that involved population aggregation, the founding of fortified communities, intensification of agricultural and pastoral production, innovative water management and irrigation technologies, and increasingly regionalized expression of EBA (material) culture—but that this project was not an urbanizing cultural transformation. I focus on mortuary practices at two major, well-published EBA walled communities, Jericho and Bab adh-Dhra`, in order to demonstrate the lack of coherence, degree of diverse material practices, and absence of pronounced differentiation in EBA society.

Status, kinship, and place of burial at Early Bronze Age Bab adh‐Dhra': A biogeochemical comparison of charnel house human remains

“…Indeed, for the entire southern Levant, cemeteries have only been found at Jericho and Bab adh‐Dhra' (Ilan, 2002; Greenberg, ). Alternatively, people from nearby settlements may have simply moved into Bab adh‐Dhra' for economic reasons or as part of exogamous marriage practices (Chesson, , ; Greenberg, ). If these individuals grew up outside of Bab adh‐Dhra', but gained residency at a later age, they may appear to be nonlocal despite being afforded the funerary rites of the local community.…”

“…Chesson () has argued that there was little difference in lifeways between those living in fortified towns and individuals inhabiting more rural sites, particularly as a portion of the population would have often been found working outside town sites, tending to fields or pastures. This, combined with residential structures found both within and outside of the town walls at Bab adh‐Dhra' itself (Chesson, ), offers support to the idea that group identity may have extended beyond the site's fortification walls.…”

“…In particular, the ways in which these communities organized themselves underwent a fundamental shift as small villages along wadis eventually grew into fortified town sites (Chesson, ; Rast & Schaub, ). While such changes had previously been attributed to processes associated with urbanization, these developments differed considerably from the socioeconomic and political complexity of neighboring urban centers in Mesopotamia and Egypt (Adams, ; Chesson, ). Instead, more nuanced investigations of material culture from the Dead Sea Plain—including those goods deposited with the dead—point to a cultural transformation that was demonstrably entrenched in its own regional history and driven by site‐specific guidelines following localized resource and production histories (Chesson, ; Chesson & Philip, ).…”

“…While such changes had previously been attributed to processes associated with urbanization, these developments differed considerably from the socioeconomic and political complexity of neighboring urban centers in Mesopotamia and Egypt (Adams, ; Chesson, ). Instead, more nuanced investigations of material culture from the Dead Sea Plain—including those goods deposited with the dead—point to a cultural transformation that was demonstrably entrenched in its own regional history and driven by site‐specific guidelines following localized resource and production histories (Chesson, ; Chesson & Philip, ). Subsequently, despite at least some agricultural intensification and evidence for increased social differentiation on the Dead Sea Plain, EBA communities appear to have largely resisted vertical stratification, and correspondingly, the emergence of elite societal factions.…”

Essential Tensions: A Framework for Exploring Inequality Through Mortuary Archaeology and Bioarchaeology

“…In his discussion of Mesopotamian urbanization, Adams (2012) draws attention to the issue of coherence as a means of evaluating whether the process of urbanization was "revolutionary." Chesson (2015) has expanded on Adam's discussion and provided a definition of coherence as "a synthetic qualitative 'measurement' combining multiple evidentiary lines (e.g., settlement patterns, community scales, economic complexity, social differentiation, political structures) to suggest an overall characterization of a society" (Chesson 2015:58). For Chesson, coherence describes how well or poorly different lines of archaeological evidence support a particular theoretical model of social organization.…”