Early Urban Landscapes: Early Bronze Age Urban Society on the Kerak Plateau, Jordan

University Of Notre Dame, Notre Dame IN

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Meredith S. Chesson will conduct one field season of archaeological research on the Kerak Plateau of Jordan. Dr. Chesson's research project combines archaeological methods and social anthropological models of "heterarchy" to investigate the social, political and economic structures of the earliest urban settlements in the Southern Levant. Focusing on the third millennium urban communities on the Kerak Plateau in central Jordan, survey and test excavations of eight Early Bronze Age (EBA) settlements will collect data to assess the applicability of this alternative model for reconstructing the nature of this early urban society. Over the last century, researchers have proposed many models for understanding the process of EBA urbanism and the nature of urban society. Recent excavations at several sites, including Zeraqon, Yarmuth, Arad, Megiddo, and Handaquq South, demonstrate a surprising diversity in scale of settlement, nature of economic base, settlement in environmental zones, and life history of the EBA community. In this investigation of EBA walled towns, researchers are uncovering a diversity of expression of urban life that challenges the normative boundaries of traditional models of secondary state formation, chiefdoms, and the nature and role of ritual and elite institutions. This diversity of social, political and economic structures of EBA life presents researchers with an intriguing theoretical puzzle: is it possible to encompass the variation of EBA urban lifeways, economic bases, social networks, and political structures into an explanatory model? Can any reconstruction accommodate the range of cultural expression that we define as EBA society? In attempting to answer this question, Dr. Chesson's research seeks to test the applicability of heterarchy in reconstructing the nature of EBA urban society. Dr. Chesson's project combines a macroscale (regional) and microscale (site by site) approach, investigating the nature of economic, social, and political structures and ties of communities in the region by gathering data at eight EBA urban settlements on the Plateau. In pedestrian surveys at these eight EBA urban communities, and test excavations at two of these sites, the team will document the scale of settlement, classes of material culture, specific forms of artifacts, and materials from which they were fashioned to provide insights into the complex connections between modes in EBA urban society, and the nature of cultural links between these settlements. The Kerak Plateau research project emerges from the reevaluation of models for understanding urban society, and contributes to archaeological investigations of social complexity and urbanism at local, regional and global levels. The project's documentation of site chronologies, material culture, and settlement size data, and the preliminary understanding of the nature of economic, political and social structures, will produce a database for comparing other EBA urban communities in both marginal and rich ecological zones, facilitating site to site comparisons, as well as regional comparisons. On an even broader level, this research offers comparative data in examining the development of social inequality, the rise of urban societies, and the links between ecology and society. The Kerak Plateau Project will offer more data and ideas to this broader anthropological dialogue on the development of social complexity and the growth of an urban society.