Steven E. Falconer

Rural Responses to Early Urbanism: Bronze Age Household and Village Economy at Tell el-Hayyat, Jordan

AbstractTemporal and spatial patterns of faunal, floral, and ceramic deposition reveal several aspects of household and village economy at Tell el-Hayyat, Jordan. Hayyat was a modest farming hamlet (0.5 ha) with 100–150 inhabitants, which was occupied in six major phases between ca. 2100 and 1500 B.C. This timespan covers the entire Middle Bronze Age, commonly considered the heyday of early urbanism in the southern Levant. Ethnographic and ancient historical exa1nples of agrarian villages in SW Asia include settlements administered by crown or temple estates, held as private property by elite families or absentee landlords, or owned collectively by resident villagers. Data drawn from Tell el-Hayyat Phases 5,4, and 3 (dating to Middle Bronze IIA and IIB) suggest some changes toward a commercially-oriented rural economy, as might be anticipated for villages held by institutional or private estates. Most of the Hayyat data, however, suggest trends toward enhanced economic autonomy, as expected for a collecti...

Household and community behavior at Bronze Age Politiko-Troullia, Cyprus

Abstract We investigate intrasite patterns of artifacts and floral and faunal data to interpret household and community behavior at the Middle Cypriot (Bronze Age) village of Politiko-Troullia in the foothills of the Troodos Mountains, Cyprus. Floral evidence indicates cultivation of orchard crops (e.g., olive and grape), as well as the persistence of woodlands that provided wood for fuel. Animal management combined herding of domesticated sheep, goat, pig, and cattle with the hunting of Mesopotamian fallow deer. Metallurgical evidence points to the production of utilitarian copper tools in household workshops. Group activities are reflected by the deposition of anthropomorphic figurines, spinning and weaving equipment, and deer bones in an open courtyard setting. In sum, Politiko-Troullia exemplifies a diversified agrarian economy on a distinctly anthropogenic landscape that fostered the development of household and supra-household social differentiation in pre-urban Bronze Age Cyprus.

Toward a Grand Narrative of Bronze Age Vegetation Change and Social Dynamics in the Southern Levant

We introduce a grand narrative on the development of Levantine Bronze Age civilization by applying digital technology to integrate long-term paleovegetation modeling with regional settlement patterns over the course of two millennia in the mid-Holocene. We consider the implications of shifts in potential vegetation linked with ancient climate change as a means of refreshing archaeological narratives on the causes and consequences of regional social dynamics, especially those related to the rise and collapse of agrarian town-based complex society. This study applies GIS, remote sensing, and statistical modeling tools (MAXENT) to nearly 1700 historical and modern plant species observation points across the southern Levant to create maps of modern and past potential vegetation based on annual precipitation and temperature values generated by a macrophysical climate model. We model the past potential vegetation of the Levant in 100-year intervals between ca. 5500 and 3000 years BP. Modeled ancient environmental dynamics are linked to settlement pattern shifts as they reflect the coalescence and dissolution of aggregated Bronze Age communities and town-based social systems. Junctures of environmental, archaeological, and historical change serve as interpretive touchstones around which grand narratives of the Levantine Bronze Age can be built.

Book review: Water, Life and Civilisation: Climate, Environment and Society in the Jordan ValleyMithenStevenBlackEmily (eds) Water, Life and Civilisation: Climate, Environment and Society in the Jordan ValleyCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 520 pp. £80.00, US

This volume presents the results of an ambitious five-year project (2005–2009) based at the University of Reading ‘to assess the changes in the hydrological climate of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and their impact on human communities between 20,000 BP and ad 2100, with a case study of the Jordan Valley’. The research theme ‘Water, Life and Civilisation’ (and hence the volume’s title) stems from the editors’ perception of a global ‘water crisis’ now and in the foreseeable future. This all-embracing orientation fits well with the interdisciplinary research mission at Reading described by the editors. Indeed, the challenges inherent in the seemingly ubiquitous disciplinary reorganization of universities lead the editors to call for a ‘post-disciplinary academic world’. In keeping with the ambitious scope of this research agenda, no less than 40 authors contribute 27 chapters that are book-ended with detailed introductory and concluding discussions by the editors. In light of the academic disciplinary realities alluded to above, this project is an amalgam of five sub-projects in meteorology, palaeoenvironmental research, hydrology, archaeology and development studies, which correspond roughly to the thematic parts of this volume in which the chapters are organized. Although the volume considers evidence spanning the last 20,000 years, its social focus lies on ‘civilisation’, i.e. the agrarian societies of the last five millennia characterized by social, economic and political complexity, as defined by archaeologists. This project adds the attribute of sophisticated systems of water management for the purpose of understanding ‘the complex relationships between water availability, water management and the emergence of social complexity’. With this social orientation in mind, the editors turn much of their attention to the myriad impacts of climate change, arguing for the importance of testing Global and especially Regional Climate Models in the past to assess their applicability to the future. They note, for example, that Holocene aridification in the Middle East may parallel predicted regional decreases in rainfall. The contributions of the editors in particular (they co-author 15 of the 29 chapters), turn an eye from the past to predicted rises in global temperatures through the twenty-first century that threaten the future availability of water and food on a worldwide basis. This project’s interdisciplinary research programme calls for building a chain of models: a Global Circulation Model that informs a Regional Circulation Model, which informs a more localized hydrological model, which informs archaeological and ethnographic studies, especially of water utilization. The formal climate modelling encompasses the entire Mediterranean Basin and utilizes the Regional Climate Model HadRM3, which was developed originally to predict twenty-first century climate change in the UK. The volume’s large regional study area is entirely appropriate, given the westerly storm tracks that fuel the meteorological and climate dynamics of southwestern Asia. The palaeoenvironmental, hydrological, archaeological and developmental studies, on the other hand, are much more concentrated geographically in southern Jordan, especially along the Wadi Araba and southern Jordan Valley. This focus on the southern portion of the southern Levant raises an interesting paradox. On the one hand, this region, largely arid and agriculturally marginal through the Holocene, provides an ideal setting in which to monitor the effects of climate change on agrarian society. For these same reasons, however, this region was never as densely settled as the Levantine coastal plain and foothills (especially during the urbanized Middle Bronze Age), much less the Nile Valley or Mesopotamian floodplain. Thus, a major challenge for archaeologists lies in developing comparably multidisciplinary projects to address climatic, environmental and social dynamics in the less-marginal and more heavily populated heartlands of past and future civilisations. Various discussions throughout the volume underscore the importance of dramatic episodes of climate change (e.g. the increasingly celebrated 4.2 ka event) as major factors affecting Near Eastern cultural trajectories, while reviewing the inherent difficulties in substantiating climatic causes for social and economic effects. In the course of linking individual studies to sub-projects and larger project goals, the editors highlight hydrology as a key link between climate change and human society greatly in need of study (once again harkening back to the volume’s title). An equally significant inference, noted more subtly and addressed only modestly in this volume, notes the importance of vegetation dynamics that link climate perturbations to the changing landscapes that mould and are moulded by agrarian civilisations. Water, Life and Civilisation presents a first-rate compilation of the rationale, design, methods and results of a very ambitious research agenda. The editors and authors are forthright in discussing successes and difficulties in equal detail (a hallmark of sound science), thereby providing substantial intellectual contributions that can be explored and applied in other temporal or geographical contexts. This volume is a timely addition to current academic literature seeking the means to contribute meaningfully to future global discourse on environmental–cultural interaction, especially regarding the agricultural basis of modern civilisation.