Insights into the economic organization of the Phoenician homeland: a multi-disciplinary investigation of the later Iron Age II and Persian period Phoenician amphorae from Tell el-Burak

Abstract

This paper details the results of a large-scale multi-disciplinary analysis of Iron Age pottery from a settlement in the core of the Phoenician homeland. The research presented is centred upon a large corpus of Phoenician carinated-shoulder amphorae (CSA) from the later Iron Age II and Persian period contexts at the coastal site of Tell el-Burak. Traditional typological investigations are combined with a focused archaeometric approach including a new quantitative method for the morphometric analysis of amphorae, thin-section petrography, geochemistry and organic residue analyses, aimed at gaining a more detailed understanding of the organization of the Phoenician economy. Despite gradual, but marked typological changes, very little change in the fabrics of these amphorae was noted over the 400-year Iron Age occupation of the site. The research, thus, demonstrates that the production of Iron Age amphorae from Tell el-Burak was highly organized, and was undertaken by long-lived, sustained and centralized modes. The establishment of Tell el-Burak and this new pottery industry coincides with the proliferation of the world’s first great imperial powers, the Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian and Persian empires; the outcomes of this research provide new insights into socio-economic strategies adopted in the Phoenician homeland during this pivotal time.

Keywords:

• amphorae
• Phoenicia
• Lebanon
• Late Iron Age
• Persian period
• morphometrics
• petrography
• organic residue analysis

Acknowledgements

This work was generously supported by the American University of Beirut Research Board as part of the research project ‘Tell el-Burak in the Iron Age: environment and daily life in a Phoenician city of the motherland’; and by a Council for British Research in the Levant Pilot Study Award; and by a grant received from the Internal University Research Funding of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; and the restoration of amphorae from House 3 at Tell el-Burak was funded by the SFB 1070, Project A05 (project directors at Tübingen University: J. Kamlah and S. Riehl).

ORCID

Aaron Schmitt http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8997-1898

Kamal Badreshany http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8799-7234

Evgenia Tachatou http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6596-6197

Notes

1 Based on Khalifeh (1988: 160).

2 Letters I and J are omitted to avoid confusion with numerical characters.

3 © J. P. Thalmann & ARCANE, 2006; v. 1.05 (11.01.2007).

4 Such a scenario is possible if the amphorae were full during the buildings collapse. Nevertheless, soil can be an ambiguous source because it introduces random plant material and does not shield the fatty acids the same way the ceramic matrix does.

5 We thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing out this issue in the original draft.