Investigating the Social Dynamics of Iron Age Copper Production: Preliminary Results from New Excavations at Khirbat al-Jariya, Jordan

Summary

This paper presents preliminary results from the 2014 Edom Lowlands Regional Archaeology Project (ELRAP) excavation at Khirbat al-Jariya (KAJ), an Iron Age copper production site in southern Jordan’s copper ore-rich Faynan region. To complement earlier work on copper production activities at KAJ, industrial and administrative areas were sampled. Stratigraphic excavations in both these areas applied a cutting-edge cyber-archaeology workflow in order to ensure the best-possible spatial precision, accuracy, and detail in documentation and recording strategies. An intensive program of real-time GIS data recording (ArchField), Structure from Motion (SfM), and other techniques were applied. Ongoing research with the data, collected from these areas aims to investigate the social dynamics of copper production in the southern Levant during the early Iron Age, just prior to the peak of industrial copper industry during the period as exemplified by nearby Khirbat en-Nahas – the largest IA copper factory in the southeastern Mediterranean region By combining investigation of a non-industrial area at the site and one of the industrial slag mounds, we aim to complement knowledge gleaned from past and present excavations of copper production contexts at KAJ in order to develop a more complete picture of life at the site.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• New Perspectives on the Archaeology of Technological Change   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage