An archaeology of destruction: Households and the use of domestic space at iron II Tel Halif

Abstract

The dissertation investigates household organization for the inhabitants of southern Judah during the Iron Age II (late 8th century B.C.E.). It specifically attempts to broaden our understanding of the social unit which occupies the pillared dwellings so prevalent throughout the southern Levant during this time. This understanding comes through a spatial analysis of the de facto refuse from a single pillared dwelling preserved well in a destruction stratum and excavated at Tel Halif in southern Israel. Patterns observed in the occurrences, distributions, and frequencies of the de facto refuse, especially the ceramics, are associated with past activities and activity areas and used to infer the socio-economic organization of the occupants of the pillared dwelling, but only after patterns introduced by formation processes in various contexts are isolated and accounted for. Organization of the dwelling's space and inhabitants is inferred using ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological data and archaeometric techniques, and an "archaeological household" is identified. This is compared with the biblically reconstructed household, but only after the use of biblical texts for historical reconstructions of the Iron II is addressed. Thus, in addition to study of the Iron II household, the dissertation determines the usefulness of destruction strata from tell-type sites of the southern Levant, particularly ceramics, for reconstructing household organization. It also examines the "goodness of fit" between archaeological and biblical reconstructions for the Iron II household of the southern Levant--two disparate and sometimes dialectical sources of data.