Delving into Early Bronze I: Societal shifts in Southern Levant

AMMAN — According to radiocarbon calibrated dates, the Early Bronze I (EB 1) lasted almost six centuries, between c. 3,700 and c. 3,100 BC. Some societal changes took place during that period which shaped societies after six hundred years.

“Archaeologists, therefore, differentiate between an early phase [EB IA}, c. 3,700–3,400 C, a late phase [EB IB], c. 3,400– 3,200 BC, and a terminal phase [Final EB IB], c. 3,200–3,100/3,000 BC, which is transitional with the following EB II period,” the professor Pierre de Miroschedji from National Centre for Scientific Research said, adding that the modalities of the transition between the Late Chalcolithic and EB I are still poorly understood.

“In the coastal plain of southern Levant, there are indications of a smooth transition. Everywhere else, the beginning of a new period is felt rather abruptly in subsistence modes, pattern of settlement, material culture, foreign relations, funerary practices, and cult,” Miroschedji elaborated, adding that at the beginning of the new civilisation, a new subsistence economy emerged during the fourth millennium, which characterised the Mediterranean zone from this time onward .

“It is a mixed agro-pastoral economy based on agriculture [cereals and leguminous], horticulture [olive and vine], and animal husbandry [cattle, sheep and goats—pig whenever possible—and donkey domesticated in the EB I]. The significant rise of a sedentary population in the Early Bronze Age suggests that both the surface of arable lands and productivity increased, a consequence of the development of floodwater farming and the introduction of the plough, possibly in the EB I,” Miroschedji underlined.

The development of horticulture represents the most important agricultural innovation since the Neolithic, which had a considerable impact on economic and social organisation.

Miroschedji explained that the advent of a new subsistence economy was soon translated onto the settlement map.

The first striking feature is the settlement hiatus: Most of the Late Chalcolithic settlements were abandoned and a number of the EB I settlements are newly founded, a movement which implies a strong sedentarisation process.

“In addition the sharp increase in the number of sites is remarkable, suggesting a significant demographic rise, at least for the sedentary segment of the population. Another conspicuous change concerns the spatial distribution of sites: Previously almost empty, the hilly areas and the central highlands witnessed the foundation of numerous small settlements, some of which became major cities in the Bronze and Iron Ages,” Miroschedji underlined.

“At the same time, scores of small settlements inhabited by transhumant pastoralists appeared in the semi-arid southern margins of the Negev. The process of sedentarisation, however, was not uniform. In some areas, such as the central Shephelah region, two phases can be identified: the first marked by the founding of new settlements, the second by the abandonment of some and the grouping of their inhabitants into a few larger sites, one of which became a regional centre in the following period,” Miroschedji highlighted.

Elsewhere the focal point of future settlement seems to have been a cemetery established initially at the centre of the territory inhabited by people still broadly semi-nomadic.

These EB IA–B settlements were all villages.

They rarely exceeded an area of 5 ha, although some were very large, sometimes larger than the EB II–III cities that succeeded them but excavations suggest that they were sparsely built, with dwellings disorderly distributed and separated by open spaces.

“These dwellings were mostly of the courtyard type [a broad room preceded by a courtyard], attested in the southern Levant since the Late Neolithic. Another kind of dwelling, considered a hallmark of the EB IA, is represented by oval or elongated houses with apses at both ends. These are found on a dozen of settlements along the coast, as well as in Lebanon,” Miroschedji said, noting that some EB IB settlements also enclosed multi-roomed buildings used for storage, cultic activities, and various other purposes.