Regionalism, social boundaries and cultural interaction in the Levantine Early Bronze Age

Abstract

The Levantine Early Bronze Age (EBA; 3800/3600– 2600/2500 BCE; Regev et al. 2012; Table 1) challenges generations of researchers, that are forced to change approaches, refine methods and reconsider narratives in order to explain the nature of social change and the profound transformations reflected in the material culture (Albright 1949; Chesson 2015; Chesson and Philip 2003; Esse 1991; Greenberg 2019; de Miroschedji 1989; Philip 2001; Philip and Baird 2000). The elephant in the room is, of course, the urbanization processes that swept through the Ancient Near East during the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE, resulting in unmistakable change in the social, economic and political matrix in all sub-regions comprising this area. The EBA in the southern and central Levant involves independent trajectories within the overall pattern of rising complexity, with multifarious regional and local narratives. Co-existing and being in contact with societies that participated in the formation of the first bureaucratic states and literate civilizations, Levantine societies found their own, different, nonlinear ways of re-organization and development (Chesson 2015; Chesson and Philip 2003; Greenberg 2019; Joffe 1993; Pollock 1999; Stein 2012; Yoffe 2005). The co-existing, and sometimes competing, regional narratives of social and political developments in the Levantine EBA are a reflection of the environmental variability and fragmentation characterizing the narrow Mediterranean strip along the Eastern Mediterranean littoral and neighbouring steppe and desert regions. The abundance of archaeological data assembled from the different parts of the Levant expresses the existence of small-scale, yet spatially coherent settlement systems (or activity systems in the case of more arid regions) with high cultural integration. Each of these systems had a somewhat different trajectory within the overall EBA sequence, resulting in distinct patterns of material culture that only partially overlap chronologically (Ben-Yosef et al. 2016; Chesson 2015; Greenberg 2002; 2019; de Miroschedji 1989; 2014; Müller-Neuhof 2014; Richard 2014; Savage et al. 2007). These differences constitute tangible manifestations to the formation and recreation of social identities, circulation of ideas and traditions, reshaping of cultural boundaries, and the rise and decline of regional powers. Deep comparative examination of the material culture in each region may get us closer to delineating the invention of regional entities, in the sense of social and political units, as well as