Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Social Boundaries and Secondary State Formation in Southern Jordan: Modeling Iron Age Settlement Patterns in the Southern Levant

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral research project will explore how the manipulation of social boundaries, trade and copper metallurgy contributed to secondary state formation in the southern Levant - specifically in ancient Edom (southern Jordan) during the Iron Age II period (ca. 1200-500 BCE). The proposed 'Lowlands to Highlands' (L2HE) Edom archaeological project will take place starting March 26th, 1996. Applying high precision radiocarbon dating, this project will conduct typological, seriological, and stylistic analyses of ceramics through an intensive systematic archaeological field survey, together with four small (5 x 5 meter) soundings at key Iron Age sites in the highlands of Edom. The project will use advanced digital archaeological recording techniques developed from the past six years of the co-PI's participation on the UCSD - DOAJ Jabal Hamrat Fidan (JHF) project in the lowlands of Edom (Levy et al 2001; Levy et al 2005). To date, these approaches have not been implemented in the highland. The lack of stratified sites with absolute dates in the Edomite highlands has hampered researchers' abilities to link the history and social trajectories of the lowlands and highlands together. One of the key intellectual merit's of this project is to solve this problem through collection of stratified ceramic assemblages and high precision AMS radiocarbon dates from three Iron Age sites on the highlands for direct comparison with the radiometrically dated sites and ceramic assemblages from the JHF project in the lowlands. The results from these studies will contribute directly to Levantine archaeology by allowing a reexamination of the chronological framework of the archaeological sites discovered through the extensive survey carried out by this project and past projects in other areas of the region. This dataset will provide the tight chronological control lacking in past archaeological models that is crucial for understanding state formation in Iron Age Edom. Furthermore, the inclusion of the extensive survey data in the highlands with the project's proposed ceramic typological and stylistic analyses including INAA, petrographic thin-section analysis, and organic residue analysis will allow an anthropological archaeological study to be conducted to investigate what role social boundaries and homogenization played in Iron Age state formation. The proposed project will also have a broader impact on the scientific community and society in several different ways: 1. This project is the first step in showing how advanced digital archaeology field methods can be applied by archaeologists in a variety of research areas with different research goals in mind. Specifically, this work will show how small projects can utilize these methods with minimal investment, but achieve similar results of rapid data processing and digital publication for broad dissemination. 2. Advancing discovery and understanding through publication of the project's results through journals, the web, dissertation, and contribution of the ceramics to the UCSD Levantine archaeology lab for undergraduate teaching. 3. Involving students from UCSD and local community colleges in the project's analyses. 4. The participation and training of Jordanians in the archaeological survey and soundings.