Settlement and society in Early Bronze I and II Canaan

Abstract

This dissertation discusses the development of the Early Bronze I and II periods in the southern Levant or Canaan and changes in indigenous patterns of social complexity. Settlement pattern and other data are used. Chapter One outlines aspects of methodology, beginning with an assessment of archaeological surveys and their limitations. Issues of survey design, execution and publication, formation processes, and the analysts of survey materials, all make settlement patterns problematic. They do not represent an adequate or accurate sample upon which to base socio-economic or political inferences. Chapter Two reviews the history of archaeological work and thought on the Early Bronze I period from the 1930s untll the present. Chapter Three reviews the theoretical and archaeological background to the emergence of complex societies In the fourth and third millennia BC. The southern Levant was 'preadapted' to cycles of rising and collapsing complexity by organizational and ultimately ideological mechanisms of social decomposition and reformulation, necessitated by the diversity of the southern Levantine geo-environment, small physical scale, and fluctuations in climate. The Early Bronze Age is the beginning of an episode which alternated between periods of urban and village life. The Chalcolithic period is reviewed. Chapter Four discusses social organization and change In the village-level EB I period. Control over metals and other resources and highland settlement are noted. The relationship of Canaan with its neighbors is discussed, and particularly Egyptian colonlalism. EB I is the starting point for a pattern of development and collapse around the fundamental building block of small kin or lineage units. Chapter Five discusses the EB II period and the structure and operation of Canaanite 'urban' systems. Economic power over immediate hinterlands and rural hIghland producers was exerted by lowland sItes controlling the distribution and exchange of agrIcultural goods, prlmarily the Mediterranean crops of olives and grapes, and their ceramic containers. Among the results were both dependent and independent rural settlement. Chapter Six presents several generalizations on archaeological approaches to complex societies, and dIscusses cyclical aspects of changes in social complexity In Canaan during latar periods. Site lists and maps are presented.