The proposed research will examine the role of technological knowledge and practice in ancient human societies as a trigger for social change. The focus will be on Iron Age (ca. 1200-500 BCE) societies of the southern Levant, and in particular those residing in the copper ore district of Faynan in southern Jordan, where the copper industry was the raison d'être for human settlement for millennia.
The beginning of the Iron Age in the southern Levant was characterized by fundamental changes not only in the social and political order but also in subsistence and technological systems. Following the collapse of Late Bronze Age civilizations in the eastern Mediterranean, a power vacuum arose in the Levant that created opportunities for local complex Levantine societies to emerge. How and why these Iron Age complex societies evolved is a hotly debated topic. While the general outline of social changes are clear, there is a substantial need to evaluate these processes from an anthropological perspective. This perspective will provide a useful framework for extracting social inferences from the scarce archaeological evidence. This need is strengthened in the light of the complex and controversial quality of the main historical source for the Iron Age southern Levant, the Hebrew Bible. Applying objective anthropological models and science-based data analyses to archaeological data may also result in new ways of interpreting pertinent historical accounts.
The proposed research will use technology as a lens through which to assess social complexity and social c hange through the Iron Age sequence in southern Jordan. Accordingly, the principal theoretical frame to be employed derives from the concept of chaîne opératoire, a model of the intertwined activities that comprise a technological process, seeking to trace the interconnections between market forces, methods of crafting and manufacture, to the organization of production. By utilizing an interdisciplinary approach that combines archaeological data analyses with geosciences for reconstructing the fundamentals of copper mining and smelting techniques and applying theoretical models of production and exchange, the proposed research aims to flesh out the cycles of changes in the chaîne opératoires for the key phases of the Iron Age copper industry of Faynan, some of which are related to fundamental changes in social organization during the region’s rise of the first historic state level societies. Coupled with supplementary theoretical tools, such as mode and organization of production, inferences derived from the archaeological record will help to assess underlying conjuncture of tight connection between technology and social complexity. Further hypotheses will be assessed, such as that technology was a significant force in triggering, fostering and shaping social conditions, as well as the assumption that technological footprints in the archaeological record may be regarded as a proxy to complexity level of a given society.
On the theoretical level, the challenge will be to identify idiosyncratic components and qualities in the general chaîne opératoires of copper production in the Iron Age sequence, as well as to characterize differences in phases within this period. On the archaeological level, the challenge will be to recover technological and social components from the fragmented archaeological record. For the latter, the rich archaeological data obtained by Edom Lowland Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) in recent years comprise an unprecedented unpublished and original database for reconstructing the still obscure Iron Age processes of copper technology. These archaeological data are based on three large scale excavations in the copper production sites of Khirbat en-Nahas, Khirbat al-Jariya and Khirbat Hamrat Ifdan, a small sounding in the fortress of Ras al-Miyah copper mines and the Iron Age IIA copper smelting site of Timna 30 in southern Israel, as well as on regional archaeological survey of trade routes in the vicinity of Faynan.
Assessment of archaeological data from Faynan, coupled with comparative cross-cultural archaeometallurgical and ethnoarchaeological data from other localities and periods will provide the key to uncovering social inferences and to testing theoretical models.