A Note on the Earliest Appearance of the Hand-Made, Straight-Sided Cooking Pot in the Southern Levant (original) (raw)
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The excavations carried out since 1964 at Ebla-Tell Mardikh (North Inner Syria), have brought to light large sectors of the Old Syrian town dating to the Middle Bronze Age II (c. 1800-1600 BC). A large quarter of houses located in the Area B East, at the foot of the Acropolis in the South-Western sector of the Lower Town , and the Western Fort, built on the top of the rampart defending the town during the Middle Bronze Age, provided a large evidence of fire installations and contexts related to the food processing (cooking pots, grinding tools, and bio-archaeological remains). Within a more wide project of environmental cross-disciplinary researches, including archaeometry, bio-archaeology, palaeogeography, sedimentological and geological analyses, we will focus here the attention on the typology of fireplaces for cooking and/or heating, proposing a comparison between a public defensive complex and a group of private dwellings.
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 373: 199-217, 2015
The Early Bronze-Middle Bronze transition in the southern Levant has been the subject of much debate, as few sequences span this transitional horizon. Indeed, scholars are divided as to the origins of the re-urbanization process, with some advocating indigenous development, whilst others assert foreign, specifically Egyptian or Syrian influence. The identification of a terminal EB IV horizon at the settlement site of Tell Umm Hammad, Jordan, has the ability to offer a new and important insight into this enigmatic period. Analysis here suggests that the re-urbanization of the southern Levant during the early Middle Bronze Age may in fact be due to a fusion of indigenous, Syrian and Egyptian influence, with each of these focused on specific geographic regions within the southern Levant.
The excavations carried out since 1964 at Ebla-Tell Mardikh (North Inner Syria), have brought to light large sectors of the Old Syrian town dating to the Middle Bronze Age II (c. 1800-1600 BC). A large quarter of houses located in the Area B East, at the foot of the Acropolis in the South-western sector of the Lower Town , and the western Fort, built on the top of the rampart defending the town during the Middle Bronze Age, provided a large evidence of fire installations and contexts related to the food processing (cooking pots, grinding tools, and bio-archaeological remains). within a more wide project of environmental cross-disciplinary researches, including archaeometry, bio-archaeology, palaeogeography, sedimentological and geological analyses, we will focus here the attention on the typology of fireplaces for cooking and/or heating, proposing a comparison between a public defensive complex and a group of private dwellings.
The Philistines and Other Sea Peoples in Text and Archaeology, 2013
The search for the biblical Philistines has provided previously unanticipated insights into one of the most pivotal periods of time, namely, the demise of the Late Bronze “Age of Internationalism,” and the ensuing cultural and political fragmentation of the eastern Mediterranean region.The discovery of five twelfth-century BCE pottery kilns in Field INE at Tel Miqne-Ekron, used in the firing of monochrome-decorated and other Aegean-style pottery, is key to our understanding of production of this very distinctive repertoire. In the article, I briefly summarize the relevant stratigraphic sequence at Tel Miqne-Ekron, including a short overview of the basic ceramic assemblages associated with each major phase, as a prelude to the focus of this chapter—Philistine ceramic technology. The technology employed to produce this distinctive ceramic assemblage is examined with an emphasis on the clay sources, clay recipes, and firing techniques used to produce this pottery at Tel Miqne-Ekron.The Philistine ceramic production sequence is then contextualized and compared with earlier millennia-long indigenous potting techniques in the southern Levant. Lastly, I consider the broader regional implications of these results for our understanding of the transition from the Late Bronze to Iron I periods.
ON SOME SOUTH LEVANTINE EARLY BRONZE AGE CERAMIC 'WARES' AND STYLES
Studies on pottery of the south Levantine Early Bronze Age (Early Bronze Ages I, II and III) often use terms such as 'wares' to designate specific types of ceramics identified with regional and chronological niches in the archaeological record. While some such designations appear to be valid, as they refer to groups of objects defined by very specific parameters, others represent broad categories with poorly defined parameters. This paper presents a proposal for some specifically defined groups, traditions of ceramic production called 'wares' and 'styles', with indications of their temporal and regional distributions. It further suggests abandoning some commonly used designations that offer too little specificity, thus making them less than useful for archaeological research and discussion.
In L. Bombardieri, A. D'Agostino, G. Guarducci, V. Orsi, and S. Valentini (eds), Identity and Connectivity: Proceedings of the 16th Symposium on Mediterranean Archaeology, Florence, Italy, 1–3 March 2012. Volume I (BAR International Series 2581 (I), Oxford 2013, pp. 137-146.
The Early Bronze IV period (c.