The Chalcolithic Period of the Southern Levant: A Synthetic Review

In the southern Levant, the late fifth millennium to mid-fourth millennium BC—traditionally known as the Chalcolithic period—witnessed major cultural transformations in virtually all areas of society, most notably craft production, mortuary and ritual practices, settlement patterns, and iconographic and symbolic expression. A degree of regionalism is evident in material culture, but continuity in ceramic styles, iconographic motifs, and mortuary practices suggests a similar cultural outlook linking these sub-regions. Luxury items found in group mortuary caves provide good evidence for at least some inequality in access to exotic materials. The level of complexity in social organization, however, is still debated. Divergent interpretations of Chalcolithic socio-economic organization suggest that, with the large amount of new information now available, a reevaluation of the debate is due. In this article we synthesize the more recent evidence and weigh interpretations of processes that led to the widespread fundamental changes witnessed during the late fifth to early fourth millennium BC.     

The existence of archery in Early Bronze Age southern Levant warfare: a note

The Early Bronze Age was a time of major changes in southern Levantine regions. The spread of urbanisation in the course of the third millennium BC was accompanied by various socio-political transformations, tensions and also violent encounters, even if the evidence for the latter is hard to detect in the archaeological record. The almost complete absence of arrowheads from settlements and tombs in the southern Levant from this period has led to the assumption that combat archery was not employed during the Early Bronze Age.

This paper challenges this orthodoxy using evidence from the southern Levant and beyond, and it concludes that archery was employed in combat activities during the Early Bronze Age, albeit on a small scale that was determined by military considerations.     

The origins of sedentism and farming communities in the Levant

Particular geographic features of the Mediterranean Levant underlie the subsistence patterns and social structures reconstructed from the archaeological remains of Epi-Paleolithic groups. The Kebaran, Geometric Kebaran, and Mushabian complexes are defined by technotypological features that reflect the distributions of social units. Radiocarbon dating and paleoclimatic data permit us to trace particular groups who, facing environmental fluctuations, made crucial changes in subsistence strategies, which, in the southern Levant, led to sedentism in base camps on the ecotone of the Mediterranean woodland-parkland and the Irano-Turanian steppe. The establishment of Early Natufian sedentary communities led to a regional change in settlement pattern. The relatively cold and dry climate of the eleventh millennium B.P. forced Negev groups into a special arid adpatation. The early Holocene onset of wetter and warmer conditions favored the earliest Neolithic (PPNA) development of village life based on the cultivation of barley and legumes, gathering of wild seeds and fruits and continued hunting.     

FOURTH MILLENNIUM BC SILVER FROM TELL ESH-SHUNA, JORDAN: ARCHAEOMETALLURGICAL INVESTIGATION AND SOME THOUGHTS ON CERAMIC SKEUOMORPHS

Summary. Analytical and contextual details are given for a piece of silver sheet recovered by dry-sieving from a fourth millennium B.C. deposit at Tell esh-Shuna in the north Jordan Valley. Analysis proved that the fragment was composed of a silver-gold-copper alloy. The possible origin of such aurian silver artefacts is considered in the light of current geological evidence, and alternative mechanisms for their appearance reviewed, taking into consideration recent data pertaining to the use of 'non-utilitarian' metals in the southern Levant during the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. Reasons are given for believing that silver artefacts are under-represented in the archaeological record, and the imitation of silver vessels is suggested as a possible explanation for the appearance in Palestine of the distinctive Grey Burnished ceramics at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age.     

Tells,Invasion Theories and Warfare in Fifth Millennium B.C. North-Eastern Bulgaria

Abstract

Violence and warfare have generally played a peripheral role in studies of fifth millennium B.C. farming communities of the Lower Danube. This paper aims to reconsider the archaeological evidence of violent conflict in chalcolithic north-eastern Bulgaria with the notion that inter-group conflict was an essential part of prehistoric social life. The focus here is on the role of warfare within the context of small permanent settlements, essentially settlement mounds, from their establishment around 5000 B.C. to their alleged violent end at the transition between the fifth and fourth millennia B.C.     

Spreading of Innovative Technical Traits and Cumulative Technical Evolution: Continuity or Discontinuity?

This paper questions the spreading of techniques considered as advantageous when measured in terms of energetic efficiency. A present-day case study, in which techniques do not spread, is used to highlight a transmission model that can be used to understand the spread of technical systems in terms of demic or cultural processes. The model is then applied to the spread of the potter’s wheel in the second and third millennium bc in the southern and northern Levant. Results show that both demic and cultural processes explain how the potter’s wheel became prevalent in the Levant. The selective forces are discussed by comparing the ceramic production contexts. We conclude that technical evolution is regulated by social mutations, i.e., major discontinuities.     

The Destructive Potential of Earthworms on the Archaeobotanical Record

Abstract

As part of a large salvage project at yiftahel, Lower Galilee, Israel, layers of a Pre-Pottery Neolithic B village (of the 7th millennium B.C.) were uncovered. The excavation concentrated on a single dwelling, Structure 700, one of the largest of this period ever excavated in the Levant. Evidence for spatial variation in usage enables reconstruction of some of the activities carried out within and outside the dwelling.

A unique find was a store of more than 2000 horsebean seeds, which predates the earliest previously-known use of this vetch by about 2000 years. The excellent state of preservation of the significant botanical and faunal remains at yiftahel enables a better understanding of the diffusion of domesticated plants and animals and their exploitation in the various Neolithic communities.     

The Predynastic of Egypt

The Predynastic of Egypt, spanning an interval from ca. 4000 to 3050 B.C., was an eventful period. After the inception of food production in the Nile Valley at least a millennium before, it was the time when the identity of Egyptian society was forged. Egypt was settled by refugees from the deserts of the eastern Sahara and the southern Levant, fleeing from mid-Holocene droughts, and became a melting pot of indigenous Nilotes and desert herders, part-time cultivators, and hunters. Within a millennium, an increasing dependence on agriculture led to sedentary life and, in some cases, to the development of sizable communities. By 4000 B.C., the settled communities had also developed a distinct division of labor between men and women and ritual and religious beliefs in which women, grain, fertility, and death were salient and interrelated elements. The Predynastic communities were also faced by the most destabilizing factor of agricultural economy, namely, fluctuations of yield. Attempts to dampen the fluctuations through interregional integration led to the emergence of community representatives and eventually chiefs. Legitimation of the status of chiefs through affiliation with the traditional and supernatural power associated with women, fertility, and death and the acquisition of exotic goods stimulated trade and an industry in funerary goods. Enlargement of economic units through alliances, with occasional incidences of fighting, especially after 3600 B.C., led to the rise of a state society governed by supreme rulers. The wedding of the funerary cult of Late Predynastic Egypt with political power and military might was the basis for the most fascinating aspects of Ancient Egypt—religion and kingship.     

The DEEPSAL Project: Using the Past for Local Community Futures in Jordan

ABSTRACT

The Deep Past as a Social Asset in the Levant (DEEPSAL) project, conducted in 2015–16 by the Council for British Research in the Levant, examined two communities in southern Jordan, Beidha and Basta, who live near significant Neolithic archaeological sites. The project collected information on the communities’ current socioeconomic conditions, their relationship with local cultural heritage and how that cultural heritage currently benefits or hinders them. The information was used to inform nascent strategies to utilize the sites sustainably as development assets and suggest alternative strategies as necessary. The results showed that a tourism-based strategy is suitable for Beidha but there was a need to focus on basic business skills. For Basta a tourism-based strategy is currently unsuitable, and efforts should rather focus on supporting educational activities. The results of the project are presented here within the context of archaeology’s increasing interest to use archaeological resource to benefit local communities, and outlines lessons for that effort.     

Material Movement in the Near Eastern Epipalaeolithic: Implications of the Shell and Stone Beads of Direkli Cave,Turkey

Direkli Cave is an Epipalaeolithic site in the central Taurus mountain range in southeastern Turkey that was used by mobile hunter-gatherer communities. The assemblage of beads from the cave, made primarily from shell (marine and freshwater) and stone, shows new evidence both that bead materials were brought to the site from the shores of the Mediterranean and that the material culture of the site has relationships to the Levant, northern Mesopotamia, and inner Anatolia. This article questions how such a bead assemblage should be interpreted in the light of existing evidence for the Near Eastern and Anatolian Epipalaeolithic and what it adds to our understanding of the better known contemporary Natufian culture of the Levant. It considers the long-distance movement of materials, interregional material cultural influences, and the way the Epipalaeolithic period is conceptualized more broadly.     

Negotiating Equality through Ritual: A Consideration of Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A Period Mortuary Practices

Mortuary rituals, specifically secondary mortuary practices with the socially sanctioned removal of all or some parts of the deceased, are a powerful means of social integration during periods of social, economic, or environmental change. Integrating ethnographic data on the social impact of secondary mortuary ceremonies with archaeological evidence from the Late Natufian and Prepottery Neolithic A periods of the south-central Levant, this study explores how the development and maintenance of intentional secondary mortuary rituals, such as with the removal and reburial of skulls, served as powerful communal acts that symbolically and physically linked communities and limited the perception or reality of social differentiation. Continuity within, and meanings behind, secondary mortuary practices during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene prompts the researcher to reevaluate previous interpretations of the relationship(s) among the appearance of formalized social inequality, food production, and the definition of personal relations within Levantine Neolithic communities.     

THE RADIOCARBON CHRONOLOGY OF THE NEOLITHIC AND COPPER AGE OF NORTHERN ITALY

Summary. Until twenty years ago the chronology of the Neolithic and Copper Age settlement of Northern Italy was almost exclusively based on the stratigraphical sequence of the Arene Candide cave in Liguria. The research carried out since the sixties has strongly increased our knowledge of the earliest farming communities and the first copper using people who inhabited the country between the end of the seventh and the beginning of the fourth millennium BP. This article considers the available evidence for this period which is now supported by a good set of radiocarbon dates.     

Weak Ties and Expertise: Crossing Technological Boundaries

In this article, we question how new technological traits can penetrate cohesive social groups and spread. Based on ethnographic narratives and following studies in sociology, the hypothesis is that not only weak ties are important for linking otherwise unconnected groups and introducing new techniques but also that expertise is required. In order to test this hypothesis, we carried out a set of field experiments in northern India where the kiln has been adopted recently. Our goal was to measure the degree of expertise of the potters distributed between early and late adopters of the kiln. Our results are discussed in the light of oral interviews. Our conclusions suggest that expertise is a necessary, albeit not sufficient, condition for weak ties to act as bridges and thereby for new techniques to spread. As an example, they explain how turntables could have been adopted by potters from the northern Levant during the third millennium BC.     

Land, Kinship Relations and the Rise of Enclosed Settlement in First Millenium B.C. Britain

Enclosed settlements are characteristic of the first millennium B.C. in Britain, contrasting with the predominantly open settlements of the fourth to second millennia. Settlement enclosures have recently been interpreted in symbolic terms, the enclosure marking social divisions between social groups. Anthropological studies indicate that divisions between groups may be more clearly marked in societies which use land intensively than in ones which use it extensively, because of the need to prevent valuable land from passing outside the group by out-marriage and inheritance. The earlier first millennium B.C. was a period of agricultural intensification in Britain. It is suggested that settlement enclosure became widespread at this time because agricultural intensification led to land becoming more valued as a form of property. This in turn led to changes in kinship relations, with the division between 'insiders' and 'outsiders' becoming more significant than before. Apparently 'special' deposits of material in enclosure ditches have been interpreted as a way of reinforcing such a division.     

Towards a Socialised Archaeology of Ceramics in Great Lakes Africa

This paper presents results of recent research in Kenya and Uganda on ceramics from the first and early to mid second millennia ad. Whereas previous research has tended to emphasise the role of ceramics as chronological tools, or as an index of past ethno-linguistic identity, this paper will emphasise the role of ceramics as functioning tools. Combining archive and published data with new results from fieldwork, the evidence presented here demonstrates continuity of settlement in the Victoria Nyanza region between first millennium Urewe users and second millennium Transitional Urewe and Entebbe ceramics, and the emergence of specialist lacustrine communities. The changing nature of ceramics over this time span is compared with evidence from historical linguistics to suggest a shift in social authority from the family home to the wider community in the second millennium, and the growing influence of economic wealth or individual leadership.     

Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State

Considered one of the world’s earliest examples of a pristine state, the ancient Egyptian state arose by ca. 3000 BC. State formation in Egypt became a focus of much research in the 1970s and 1980s, as investigations of the Predynastic period in Egypt, when complex society arose there, began to uncover new evidence of the indigenous roots of this phenomenon. More recently, archaeological investigations in the Delta as well as continued work in southern Egypt have provided new evidence for the changes that took place in the fourth millennium BC. But the specific events and processes involved in this major sociopolitical and economic transformation and the resultant state still remain incompletely understood. To better understand the problem in Egypt, this study looks at the contrasting polities in fourth millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from the perspective of the political economy and the strategies to power proposed by the dual-processual theory, which also helps elucidate processes of state formation and the type of early state that developed there. The territorial expansionist model helps explain where and when this state first emerged.     

Legends,Traditions or Coincidences: Remembrance of Historic Settlement in the Central Highlands of Scotland

Study has established that sources of evidence (local traditions, documentary, cartographic, archaeological) of the burning of a settlement at Bunrannoch during the 1745/6 Jacobite uprising are contradictory. Some contradictions may result from conflation of long term social memories of earlier events during the late first millennium CE and the way in which the events surrounding the uprising were subsequently remembered. Such conflation may stem from the way identities of local communities were conceived during the late eighteenth century. Some members of local communities would have grounded themselves in traditional life ways, which were being actively transformed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In contrast, sponsors of change, or improvement, viewed such communities as largely criminal and impoverished.     

Facing two seas: Mediterranean and Atlantic contacts in the north-west of Iberia in the first millennium BC

Summary.  Despite the marginality of the region, the Later Bronze Age and Iron Age communities of the north-west of the Iberian Peninsula were engaged in active relationships with both Atlantic and Mediterranean peoples. Unlike other Atlantic regions, the area maintained direct contacts both with Mediterranean sailors and with the communities of the British Isles and north-western France simultaneously. The social relevance of these interactions and the range of imported goods transported varied throughout the first millennium BC. New evidence shows an intense involvement in Mediterranean trade from the fifth century BC onwards, while Atlantic contacts increased from the late second century BC, to reach a climax under Roman rule (first–second centuries AD).     

The culture history of Madagascar

Madagascar's culture is a unique fusion of elements drawn from the western, northern, and eastern shores of the Indian Ocean, and its past has fascinated many scholars, yet systematic archaeological research is relatively recent on the island. The oldest traces of visitors are from the first century AD. Coastal settlements, with clear evidence of ties to the western Indian Ocean trading network, were established in several places over the next millennium. Important environmental changes of both plant and animal communities are documented over this period, including the extinctions of almost all large animal species. Urban life in Madagascar began with the establishment of the entrepôt of Mahilaka on the northwest coast of the island in the twelfth century. At about the same time, communities with ties to the trade network were established around the island's coasts. From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, social hierarchies developed in several regions of the island. During the succeeding two centuries, Madagascar saw the development of state polities.     

A hoard of Nilotic nacreous shells from Egypt to Jericho (Early Bronze II, 3000–2800 BCE): Their finding,content and historical archaeological implications

ABSTRACT

The Tell es-Sultan, ancient Jericho, is amongst the earliest “cities” that rose in the Southern Levant between the end of 4th and the beginning of the 3rd millennium BCE. The site is being excavated, studied and rehabilitated for tourism by Sapienza University of Rome and the Palestinian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities since 1997. In 2017, during the 13th season of excavation, an unexpected discovery occurred: five Chambardia rubens shells have been found piled up in a dwelling unit dating back to the Early Bronze Age IB-II. The discovery is a tangible evidence of trade and cultural interconnections between the Southern Levant and Egypt, as these shells belong to a species that is only been found to live in the Nile. Moreover, chemical analysis, and thorough Scanning Electron Microscopy examination revealed that the shells contained Manganese Dioxide, an inorganic compound used as make-up ingredient in ancient Egypt, and available in the ores of the Sinai. These findings strongly support the existence of a link between the urban rise in EB IB-II through international trade of luxury goods, and are suggestive of the emergence at Jericho of a ruling elite that was influenced by Egypt.