Cultural continuity and asymmetry through the Levantine Early Bronze Age: a view from the desert

Abstract

Over the past few years, a combination of new data and a revised interpretation of old data has led to a ‘new paradigm’ for the history of the southern arid periphery of the southern Levant during the 3rd millennium BCE. It has long been known that copper was fundamental to the local economy of the Faynan district of southern Jordan: the barrenness of the Faynan region created economic asymmetry that has been used to explain changes in local settlement patterns as a response to regional demand for copper. A synthesis of data from sites in the region highlight the absence of external control of copper production and indicate innovative developments to facilitate long distance exchange through the development of a vertically integrated production network.

Keywords:

• copper
• institutional economics
• Faynan
• Early Bronze Age
• social complexity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Yael Rotem, Uri Davidovich and Mark Iserlis for the opportunity to participate in the ICAANE workshop ‘Culture and Society in the Early Bronze Age Levant’. I would like to thank the Department of Antiquity of Jordan, ACOR, the Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project staff, and student volunteers from both UCSD and UCSB for their work over many years. Thomas E. Levy offered considerable support and advice while this research was being carried out and some of the ideas here were generated in conversation with Erez Ben-Yosef and Zach Dunseth.

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/00758914.2022.2129868.

Notes

1 Barqa el-Hetiye was classified as an occupation site because the radiocarbon samples came from the habitation area of the site and not the smelting installations nearby. Smelting sites in the Arava were left out of the SPD because only one, En Yahav, has a published radiocarbon date. The chronology of the smelting sites in the Arava Valley has been addressed elsewhere (Ben-Yosef et al. 2016).