Production and Economic Organization in Early Urban versus Rural Communities in the Near East: A Zooarchaeological Approach (original) (raw)
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Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformations, edited by Campana, D., Crabtree, P., deFrance, S.D., and Lev-Tov, J., Choyke, A. Proceedings of the 10th ICAZ Conference, Mexico City, 2006, 2010
Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2024
This study aims at establishing a historically based model of animal husbandry in urban and rural settlements, in the Southern Levant. This type of model is required in the field of zooarchaeology, to better analyze and study ancient faunal remains. It also applies a non-traditional method to study and differentiate between urban and rural economies. For this aim, we used British Mandate tax files and village statistics. These are the best available historical documents for this period, that recorded herds management statistics in all settlements of Palestine. We selected only settlements inhabited by the indigenous population and divided the data into four environmental regions. We analyzed the livestock abundance and herd demography in each region. Each urban center was considered independently, while the rural villages were classified into three groups, based on the most common livestock (cattle, sheep, or goats). Results show economic variations between urban and rural settlements as well as regional trends, such as in pastoralism and agricultural management. In addition, meat industries were common in most urban centers, being the primary difference from rural economies. We applied this model to two large zooarchaeological case studies, dating from the Early Islamic to the Ottoman period; Mount Zion, located in the urban city of Jerusalem, and Tel Beth Shemesh (East), whose size and nature were not historically recorded. We found that the economic variations reflected in the model were also present in the faunal assemblages.
Animal Economy in the Chalcolithic of the Southern Levant: From Meat Source to Marketable Commodity
Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology. Springer, 2023
Economic development resulting from the exploitation of animals in the Chalcolithic period is considered one of the major factors that promoted early urbanism in the period that followed. In the current paper, we examine the animal economy in two phases of the Chalcolithic period, and track changes in exploitation of animals over time. We examine when and where exploitation of secondary products became intense. To do this, we reviewed published faunal assemblages from the southern Levant, and, based on models, estimated the exploitation of animals. Our results suggest that evidence for the exploitation of cattle for work and caprines for milk is present only beginning in the Late Chalcolithic-Ghassulian, and not from the earlier Wadi Raba and Pre-Ghassulian cultures. This significant economic advance, which transformed animal roles from a source of meat into a marketable commodity, occurred gradually across the studied period
Pigs and the pastoral bias: The other animal economy in northern Mesopotamia (3000–2000 BCE)
Discussion of the animal economy in Mesopotamia has been subject to a persistent, pastoral bias. Most general treatments assume that the Early Bronze Age (ca. 3000–2000 BCE) animal economy was dominated by the herding of sheep and goats. An examination of the abundant written evidence would support such a contention. Zooarchaeological evidence from northern Mesopotamia, however, clearly demonstrates that pigs played a major role in the diet, despite their virtual absence in the written record. In this paper, we attempt to lay bare and correct for the pastoral bias by reviewing the relatively meager written evidence for pig husbandry and by examining the zooarchaeological evidence for pigs from two angles. First, we use relative abundance data from sites across northern Mesopotamia to demonstrate the ubiquity of pigs and to identify regional-and site-level patterning in pig consumption. Second, we use a series of proxy techniques to reconstruct pig husbandry practices at three sites: Tell 'Atij, Tell al-Raqa'i, and Tell Leilan. Ultimately, we argue that this ''other " animal economy emerged to fill a niche opened up by the twin processes of urbanization and institutional expansion. For households struggling to deal with the impacts of these wide-ranging transformations, pigs offered an alternative means of subsistence and perhaps a way of maintaining some degree of autonomy.
The dramatic growth of Jerusalem in the Iron Age IIB–C raises questions regarding subsistence and relations with the city’s rural hinterland. Studies of animal economy can shed light on these questions. Here, we present results from the zooarchaeological investigation of two sites: the Western Wall Plaza in Jerusalem and Tel Moza, located a few kilometers to the west of the capital. We also compare our finds to previous results from several locations within Jerusalem. We find that while the Western Wall Plaza’s inhabitants focused on meat consumption and did not engage in actual herding, the inhabitants of Tel Moza focused on agriculture and producing caprines’ secondary products, probably supplying sheep and cattle to Jerusalem. Within Jerusalem, people living close to the Temple Mount showed a higher economic standing than those in a neighborhood on the southeastern slope of the “City of David” ridge. The higher-status neighborhoods seem to have received meat through a redistribution mechanism from the temple. These results enable us to gain several insights into rural–urban relationships and sociopolitical mechanisms in the Iron Age Levant.
Evaluating the Driving Factors of the Earliest Cities in the Near East, post-farming
2020
The Ancient Near East (A.N.E.) is the first hub where agricultural techniques were adopted into early hunter-gathering lifestyles, binding the people to the land through sedentism, glimpsed, through the first farming villages. This led A.N.E., from ~4000 BCE, to become the first home of cities. How did agriculture lead to the “domestication of the human species” (Cauvin,1978,77)? The answer perhaps lies in changing ideology and separation from the natural world which facilitated farming and more importantly sedentism. Furthermore, changing geography, climate, religious and social theories helps understand the formation of early cities such as Uruk, Tell Brak and Eridu. And ultimately what defines a city.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 2019
Pastoralism played a foundational role in the subsistence economies of the Kura-Araxes cultural tradition of the fourth and third millennia BCE. Until recently, because of a lack of zooarchaeological data, interpretations of Kura-Araxes subsistence economies were largely based on indirect proxies, including settlement patterns, site size, and the geographic distribution of material culture. These indicators, while important, are insufficient for investigating the most fundamental aspects of animal economies: what animals were herded, what animal products were exploited, and how people prepared and accessed those products. Herd management and food provisioning strategies are best addressed using meticulous zooarchaeological studies. In this paper, we use animal remains to examine animal husbandry and food provisioning strategies at the Kura-Araxes settlement of Köhne Shahar (ca. 3200–2500 BCE). The animal economy at Köhne Shahar focused on maintaining herd security and a generalized exploitation of sheep, goat, and cattle products that were primarily accessed by residents of Köhne Shahar through direct provisioning. Comparison with other contemporaneous sites demonstrates that Kura-Araxes animal economies focused on flexible and extensive household-based herd management strategies that enabled a wide range of subsistence adaptations with little evidence for specialized pastoral production.