Early Bronze Age IA mortuary practices and difference on the south-eastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan

Abstract

Early Bronze Age I mortuary practices present a fascinating opportunity to consider how archaeologists approach the question of regionalism, a task rooted fundamentally in the identification and assessment of difference. This paper discusses the intellectual scaffolding in archaeological approaches to assessing variation and homogeneity in our social, economic and political reconstructions of the EB IA by focusing on the cemeteries of Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ, Fifa and Naqʾ on the south-eastern Dead Sea Plain, Jordan. A communities of practice approach is employed to understand the nature of variation in EB IA mortuary practices. By framing mortuary practices as a craft, embedded in the sociality of technology and learning, alternatives to understanding the similarities and differences of treating the dead, and how mortuary practices on the south-eastern Dead Sea Plain offer insights into EB IA society, are considered.

Keywords:

• Early Bronze Age
• mortuary practices
• Jordan
• community of practice

Acknowledgements

I offer thanks to Yael Rotem, Mark Iserlis and Uri Davidovitch for the invitation to participate in this special issue of Levant. I am very grateful for the support of all past and present Directors and staff members of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, the American Center of Research in Amman, the Council for British Research in the Levant and the American Society of Overseas Research. I also thank the reviewers who offered excellent suggestions to strengthen this paper.

Paul Lapp’s and the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain’s excavations Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ and Fifa were supported by dozens of institutions, foundations and endowments, including the Department of Antiquities of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, American Society of Overseas Research, American Center of Research in Amman, the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment of the Humanities, National Geographic Society, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Valparaiso University, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, Rochester Institute of Technology, and the Kyle-Kelso Excavation Fund. More recent archival, drone and surface survey research were supported by DePaul University, Dartmouth College and Rick Witschonke, with post-fieldwork analysis supported by DePaul University, University of Notre Dame, Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania, and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. For a full list of donors supporting field excavations and surveys from 1965–1981 at Bâb adh-Dhrâʿ, see Schaub and Rast 1989: xiii–xiv.