The Social Archaeology of the Levant. From Prehistory to the Present

Abstract

In the forward to this varied and stimulating collection of essays on the archaeology of the southern Levant from the Palaeolithic to the present day, Thomas Levy (p. xvii) recalls how his 1998 edited volume The Archaeology of Society in the Holy Land was praised by Kent Flannery for helping the Old Testament meet the New Archaeology. Sketching an agenda for the 21st century, Levy emphasises five new or revamped themes: transdisciplinary research; the application of science to historical biblical archaeology; ‘cyber-archaeology’; high-precision dating; and climatic and environmental approaches. For Levy, social archaeology ‘aims at the ‘big picture’ of what happens in society, how it happened, how it changes, and how it is reflected in the archaeological (material culture) record’ (p. xvii). Yet, even by the time Levy 1998 was published, ‘social archaeology’ was being defined in much broader terms, reflecting a range of post-modern and post-colonial paradigms. Among other things, this ‘turn’ sought to interrogate basic methodologies (especially positivism and presentism) and to question accepted social categories (such as personhood, gender, ethnicity, race), as well as to investigate how archaeological discourse was distorted by contemporary and/or Western or colonial attitudes and epistemologies. This expanded understanding of social archaeology is introduced in the editors’ prologue to the present volume, though it is applied somewhat unevenly throughout the text, and in some cases not really addressed at all. This is not helped by the uneven presentation of material culture and archaeological contexts, or of maps and chronological charts to allow easy comparison across a highly compartmentalised structure. The book cannot, therefore, be regarded as a handbook, or indeed, as an entirely satisfactory guide for scholars working outside the discipline, whose questions on a range of topics will not be readily answered. Finally, the reality that the volume is really about the southern Levant is relegated to a footnote on p. 5 — the editors imply that the volume began with broader aims, retaining the, presumably, more marketable title. The first four sections, 26 essays in total, provide a chronological narrative beginning with the ‘dawn’ of human presence in the region, with some thematic interludes: Shahack-Gross, for example, discusses the social and technological implications of fire from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age (Chapter 5), whilst Sheridan focuses on comingled human bone assemblages in the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Byzantine periods (Chapter 11). The overall chronological coverage of the volume is impressive, from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Frankish period. Levy 1998 made it down to the British Mandate, though the present volume covers some aspects of the latter through the lenses of excavation histories, colonialism and modern heritage (Chapters 32 and 33) which raise important contemporary issues. The chapters of Part One grapple in various ways with the very nature of human society, touching upon the complexity and limitations of the datasets from Palaeolithic contexts (Chapters 1 (Rollefson) and 2 (Belfer-Cohen and Goring-Morris)), as well as the diverse and disputed pathways towards sedentism and social complexity in the Epipalaeolithic and early Neolithic (Munro and Grosman, Chapter 3). Moving forwards in time, Finlayson (Chapter 4) discusses the complex relationships between increased sedentism (or at least ‘investment in place’), the nature and social implications of settlement architecture, and broader economic strategies during the Neolithic period; stressing the importance of community and collective agency whilst identifying incremental shifts towards individual households— if not actually individuals — by the PPNB. Chapter 5 (Banning) questions the once embedded notion of the late Neolithic as a kind of Dark Age that interrupted PPNB trajectories towards urbanism; he also provides one of the few explicit discussions of gender distinctions and associated labour roles, while subtly highlighting the importance of quotidian food practices, as opposed to rare events such as feasts, in social formation. The final two chapters of Part One focus on the Chalcolithic. Chapter 7 (Rowan) contrasts the relatively simple nature of settlement forms and