Excavations at Qubur al-Walaydah, 2007–2009 (original) (raw)
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BASOR, 1993
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The central hill country of Palestine, from the Jezreel Valley in the north to the Beer-sheba Valley in the south, has been almost fully surveyed in the last two decades. The article summarizes the archaeological data on the sites and settlement patterns in the region in three phases of the fourth and third millennia B.C.E.-the Chalcolithic, the Early Bronze I, and the Early Bronze II-III-and compares them to the settlement patterns in the lowlands of the country. The highlands, which form the best-suited part of Palestine for horticulture-based economy, experienced a dramatic settlement and demographic growth in EB I. This wave of settlement was contemporaneous to the establishment of Egyptian trading communities in the southern coastal plain. The demographic expansion to the hill country was apparently stimulated by the growing demand for Palestinian horticulture products in Egypt. The intensification of agricultural specialization in the highlands and in other parts of the country played an important role in the urbanization process in the southern Levant, which also commenced at the end of EB I. 1 2 ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN AND RAM GOPHNA BASOR 289 settlement in the Early Bronze Age was the first of its kind in the history of occupation of the highlands, and as such it began the long and complex process of the "conquest" of that mountainous ecological frontier of the southern Levant for human exploitation. Synchronic and diachronic comparisons shed light on some of the fundamental mechanisms in the history of the southern Levant in the protohistoric periods. Especially important are the tantalizing questions of the beginning of large-scale fruit growing, the trade relations of the region, the urbanization of Canaan, and the possible emergence of political systems that embraced large territories.
In this study, Assaf Kleiman discusses the settlement history and material culture of complex communities that flourished in the shadow of Israel and Aram-Damascus. A detailed examination of the finds from the Lebanese Beqaa, through the Sea of Galilee, to the Irbid Plateau, offers an exceptional portrayal of the developments experienced by these communities, before and after the emergence of the territorial kingdoms; these advances include the rise and fall of local polities, the adoption and rejection of certain cultural traits, and even the background for the dissemination of writing. The study provides, therefore, a new and exciting way to look at the political relations and cultural exchange between the indigenous communities and the elites that ruled over them. Rather than interpreting the local populations simply as "Israelites" or "Aramaeans," the archaeological record reveals their diversity and highlights the discrete historical trajectories they followed from the 12th to 8th centuries BCE. See details in: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/book/beyond-israel-and-aram-9783161615436?no\_cache=1
Proceedings of the 6 th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East
writing developed during the second half of the 4th millennium BC, Jordan did not use writing until over a thousand years later. In addition, it has been proposed that the South Levantine Early Bronze Age polities, which have been identifi ed as citysates, were neither cities nor states.However, the prevailing views in recent years of the origin of the Bronze Ages have been thoroughly modifi ed. Some scholars see that urbanisation was introduced to this part of the world by newcomers, while others argue for local development and do not exclude external infl uences. The appearance of self-suffi cient towns in the Early Bronze II is parallel to the First Dynasty in Egypt, and the subsequent period the Early Bronze III was marked by the growth of numerous sedentary communities. Moreover, the Early Bronze II-III periods are considered as the fi rst major expression of the Canaanite urbanism. The Early Bronze Age IV (ca. 2300-2000 BC) has been referred to as an interlude of non-sedentary pastoral life between the town urbanism in the Early Bronze II-III and the cities in the Middle Bronze Ages. The tell sites in Jordan had been abandoned, with the exception of very rare sites such as Khirbet Iskander, and regional Early Bronze IV settlement patterns imply extensive use of dry farming land. It has also been proposed that the inhabitants of the Early Bronze IV adopted a new economic strategy and turned to be seminomadic pastoralists. This hypothesis has been combined with the literary evidence documenting the expansion of the semi-nomadic “Amorites”, but has been denied by some scholars. Paul Lapp suggested that the source of the newcomers to Palestine during the Early Bronze IV is the North. The aim of this paper is at presenting a study to the Early Bronze Age major sites either surveyed or excavated in the are
Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin, 2020
Recently concluded excavations at Khirbet el-Maqatir north of Jerusalem revealed, in part, remains of an agricultural village dating mostly to Iron Age I, during the time of Judges. Although the majority of the village was destroyed by later building at the site, the extant remains reveal much about another of the several hundred known settlement sites established in early Iron Age I in Israel’s central highlands. The Iron Age remains at KeM reflect the general characteristics of these villages, with one exception. For reasons that are not clear, the few extant homes are markedly simpler in design and much smaller than those in nearby contemporary sites at et-Tell, Beitin, Khirbet Raddana, and the slightly later Khirbet ed-Dawwara. This article will summarize KeM’s Iron Age architectural remains, pottery, small finds, and fauna, and compare them with those of other relevant sites.
"The Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem is an important historical event. For scholars this date usually marks the end of the period of the monarchy or even the end of the Iron Age, the beginning of the exilic period, etc. For many, this date was regarded as a ‘watershed’ (e.g., Bright 1972, 343). But what was the reality in Judah following the 586 BCE events? The Bible informs us that there were people remaining in the land, but seems to give the general impression that they were relatively few and unimportant. This view seems to have been prevalent in modern scholarship until recently, but is now challenged by scholars who claim that the majority of the population remained in Judah after the Babylonian destructions (mainly in rural sites). The debate that has evolved during the past few years over the issue of the settlement and demographic reality in the sixth century BCE has brought the archaeological evidence to the front. But, as is widely known, as yet no material culture of the ‘Babylonian period’ has been identified, and the debate seems to go on. The present paper aims to tackle the problem from a different direction. After briefly presenting the problem, I will suggest a new method to solve it: since these who claim that Judah was quite densely populated at the time believe that the inhabitants of the region continue to live in their hamlets and villages, an examination of continuity in excavated Iron Age rural settlements might hold the key to solving the issue. The data from various regions will be analyzed and contrasted in light of the new method, and the similarities and differences will then be used to reconstruct the processes the different regions went through during the Iron Age – Persian Period Transition. "