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ABSTRACT Analysis of 20 calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry radiocarbon (AMS¹⁴C) ages reveals a chronology for the habitation of a unique peripheral settlement at Zahrat adh-Dhra‘ 1 (ZAD 1), Jordan during the Middle Bronze Age of the Southern Levant. Bayesian modeling distinguishes three phases of occupation between the first settlement at ZAD 1, perhaps as early as about 2050 cal BCE, and its abandonment by 1700 cal BCE. ZAD 1 represents a marginal community, both environmentally and culturally, on the hyperarid Dead Sea Plain, and exemplifies the peripheral settlements that are envisioned as important elements of Bronze Age Levantine society. Most importantly for this study, it is the only peripheral site in the Southern Levant that provides a Bayesian model for its habitation during the growth of Middle Bronze Age urbanized society. The timing of ZAD 1’s constituent phases, early in Middle Bronze I, across the Middle Bronze I/II transition and in Middle Bronze II, correspond well with emerging chronologies for the Middle Bronze Age, thereby contributing to an ongoing reassessment of regional social and settlement dynamics. 

ABSTRACT Politiko- Troullia has generated the largest radiocarbon ( 14 C) dataset from a Prehistoric Bronze Age settlement on Cyprus. We present Bayesian modeling of 25 calibrated AMS ages, which contributes to an emerging multi-site 14 C chronology for Cyprus covering most of the Prehistoric Bronze Age. Our analysis places the six stratified phases of occupation at Troullia between about 2050 and 1850 cal BCE, in contrast to a longer estimated occupation inferred from pottery analysis. We provide a rare 14 C determination for the transition from Prehistoric Bronze Age 1 to 2 just after 2000 cal BCE, associated with a major architectural dislocation at Politiko- Troullia in response to local landscape erosion, possibly due to increased regional precipitation. We present a regional 14 C model for Prehistoric Bronze Age Cyprus combining the chronology for Politiko- Troullia with modeled 14 C ages from Sotira Kaminoudhia and Marki Alonia , which is bolstered by individual ages from five other settlements on Cyprus. Through the Prehistoric Bronze Age, agrarian villages on Cyprus developed the foundations for the emergence of urbanized settlement and society during the ensuing Protohistoric Bronze Age. Politiko- Troullia , in conjunction with other key settlements on Cyprus, provides a significant independent contribution to increasingly robust Bronze Age 14 C chronologies in the Eastern Mediterranean. 

The Bronze Age village of Politiko- Troullia , located in the foothills of the copper-bearing Troodos mountains of central Cyprus, was occupied ~2050–1850 cal BCE. Excavated evidence shows that community activities included copper metallurgy (ore processing, smelting and casting), crop cultivation, and rearing of livestock. Faunal analysis reveals day-to-day subsistence practices that included consumption of sheep, goat, cattle, and pig, as well as community-scale ritual feasting focused on fallow deer, Dama dama mesopotamica . In this paper, we present bone collagen stable isotope data from these taxa to infer how these animals were managed. We incorporate stable isotope baselines calculated from modern cereal grains and compare these to archaeological seeds from Politiko- Troullia . Mean values of δ 13 C and δ 15 N cluster for livestock consistent with a diet of C3 plants, with a wider range in goats that suggests free-browsing herds. Higher δ 15 N values in cattle may reflect supplemental feeding or grazing in manured fields. Plant isotope values suggest livestock diets were predominantly composed of cultivated taxa. In contrast, deer and pig bones produce more negative mean δ 13 C and δ 15 N values suggesting that the villagers of Politiko- Troullia complemented their management of domesticated animals with hunting of wild deer and feral pigs in the woodlands surrounding their village. 

Abstract Temples in antis provide clearly defined liminal spaces for ritual behaviors that are readily recognizable both textually and archaeologically. This architectural form and the religious tradition it embodied were remarkably widespread geographically and temporally, spanning the Levant and Greater Syria from the end of the Early Bronze Age until the early Iron Age. Although the Southern Levant has been characterized as highly urbanized during the Middle Bronze Age, settlement pattern analysis suggests that it was fragmented into numerous polities, as documented subsequently in the Late Bronze Age Amarna Letters. In contrast, Levantine towns and villages shared a common religious tradition marked by ritual behaviors within clearly marked liminal spaces. These behaviors are readily recognizable archaeologically at Tell el-Hayyat, Jordan, where they are framed in temple enclosures by distinct architecturally-defined boundaries, and signaled by feasting on sheep and goat, and deposition of copper-alloy figurines, tools and metallurgical remains. These lines of material and architectural evidence, and the liminal behaviors they reflect, linked villages and towns in localized Levantine polities, as exemplified among a cluster of settlements in the northern Jordan Valley. Parallel sequences of four temples in antis at Tell el-Hayyat and nearby Pella (ancient Piḫilu in the Amarna Letters) developed in tandem through the Middle Bronze Age, suggesting that temple construction and rebuilding was coordinated between town and village communities. Further examples of temples in antis and patterns of material deposition and liminal behavior suggest that this temple form and its associated ritual tradition were spread throughout the Southern Levant as part of a much larger and longer-lived cultural tradition extending across Greater Syria, which has been characterized as a Middle Bronze Age cultural koinè . Thus, despite its fractious local political environment, Middle Bronze Age Levantine society was grounded in a remarkably broad cultural tradition marked by the sacred spaces and liminal behaviors associated with temples in antis . 

ABSTRACT We present the first Bayesian 14 C modeling based on AMS ages from stratified sediments representing continuous occupation across the Early Bronze III/IV interface in the Southern Levant. This new high-precision modeling incorporates 12 calibrated AMS ages from Khirbat Iskandar Area C using OxCal 4.4.4 and the IntCal 20 calibration curve to specify the EB III/IV transition at or slightly before 2500 cal BCE. Our results contribute to the continuing emergence of a high chronology for the Levantine Early Bronze Age, which shifts the end of EB III 200–300 years earlier than the traditional time frame and increases the length of EB IV to about 500 years. Data from Khirbat Iskandar also help direct greater attention to the importance of sedentary communities through EB IV, in contrast to the traditional emphasis on non-sedentary pastoral encampments and cemeteries. Modeling of AMS data from Khirbat Iskandar bolsters the ongoing revision of Early Bronze Age Levantine chronology and its growing interpretive independence from Egyptian history and contributes particularly to re-examination of the EB III/IV nexus in the Southern Levant. 

This study employs an array of quantitative methods to analyze village agricultural practices during a time of regional urban abandonment at the end of the Early Bronze Age in the Southern Levant. Coordinated cluster and canonical discriminant analyses of stratified archaeobotanical assemblages from the village of Tell Abu en-Ni’aj, Jordan support a detailed portrait of changing crop management at a sedentary agrarian community during Early Bronze IV, a period marked by widespread mobile pastoralism. Our quantified analyses of carbonized plant remains are augmented with stable isotope composition data for major cultigens to offer an innovative perspective on Early Bronze IV agrarian life in the northern Jordan Valley. Seeds from seven occupation phases spanning the time period from about 2500 to 2200 cal BC indicate increasing primary reliance on Hordeum vulgare (hulled barley), and only modest cultivation of wheat, mostly Triticum dicoccum (emmer) over this time span. Constrained incremental sum of squares (CONISS) cluster analysis and canonical discriminate analysis (CDA) illustrate significant shifts in crop cultivation, and possibly related animal management, including a major transition at about 2375 cal BC. Our analyses further highlight the most important plant taxa that contributed to these shifts. Cultivated crops, wild species and chaff are more ubiquitous in the earlier phases at Tell Abu en- Ni’aj, while percentages of H. vulgare and ubiquities of Lens culinaris (lentil) increase in the later phases. Lower seed densities, weed ubiquities and chaff to cereal ratios suggest more distant crop processing after about 2375 cal BC. Values of Δ13C for the major cereals, which provide a proxy for water availability, indicate dry farming of barley and preferential watering of wheat. This study proposes that a suite of changes occurred between the earlier and later phases at Tell Abu en-Ni’aj, which portray generally diminished, more remote crop production, possibly amid greater drought stress, leading to village abandonment. We illustrate a multi-faceted analytical approach suitable for interpretation of comparable archaeobotanical evidence and inference of agrarian dynamicselsewhere in prehistory. 

This study employs an array of quantitative methods to analyze village agricultural practices during a time of regional urban abandonment at the end of the Early Bronze Age in the Southern Levant. Coordinated cluster and canonical discriminant analyses of stratified archaeobotanical assemblages from the village of Tell Abu en-Ni'aj, Jordan support a detailed portrait of changing crop management at a sedentary agrarian community during Early Bronze IV, a period marked by widespread mobile pastoralism. Our quantified analyses of carbonized plant remains are augmented with stable isotope composition data for major cultigens to offer an innovative perspective on Early Bronze IV agrarian life in the northern Jordan Valley. Seeds from seven occupation phases spanning the time period from about 2500 to 2200 cal BC indicate increasing primary reliance on Hordeum vulgare (hulled barley), and only modest cultivation of wheat, mostly Triticum dicoccum (emmer) over this time span. Constrained incremental sum of squares (CONISS) cluster analysis and canonical discriminate analysis (CDA) illustrate significant shifts in crop cultivation, and possibly related animal management, including a major transition at about 2375 cal BC. Our analyses further highlight the most important plant taxa that contributed to these shifts. Cultivated crops, wild species and chaff are more ubiquitous in the earlier phases at Tell Abu en-Ni'aj, while percentages of H. vulgare and ubiquities of Lens culinaris (lentil) increase in the later phases. Lower seed densities, weed ubiquities and chaff to cereal ratios suggest more distant crop processing after about 2375 cal BC. Values of Δ13C for the major cereals, which provide a proxy for water availability, indicate dry farming of barley and preferential watering of wheat. This study proposes that a suite of changes occurred between the earlier and later phases at Tell Abu en-Ni'aj, which portray generally diminished, more remote crop production, possibly amid greater drought stress, leading to village abandonment. We illustrate a multi-faceted analytical approach suitable for interpretation of comparable archaeobotanical evidence and inference of agrarian dynamics elsewhere in prehistory. 

ABSTRACT. We present two new Bayesian 14C models using IntCal20 that incorporate 17 new calibrated AMS ages for Early Bronze IV Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and Middle Bronze Age Tell el-Hayyat, located in the northern Jordan Valley, Jordan. These freshly augmented suites of carbonized seed dates now include 25 AMS dates from Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and 31 AMS dates from Tell el-Hayyat. The modeled founding date for Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj strengthens an emerging high chronology for Early Bronze IV starting by 2500 cal BC, while the end of its habitation by 2200 cal BC may exemplify a regional pattern of increasingly pervasive abandonment among late Early Bronze IV settlements in the Southern Levant. In turn, our modeled date for the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze Age transition at Tell el-Hayyat around 1900 cal BC pushes this interface about a century later than surmised traditionally, and its abandonment in Middle Bronze III marks an unexpectedly early end date before 1600 cal BC. These inferences, which coordinate Bayesian AMS models and typological ceramic sequences for Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj and Tell el-Hayyat, contribute to an ongoing revision of Early and Middle Bronze Age Levantine chronologies and uncoupling of their attendant interpretive links between the Southern Levant and Egypt.