An Examination of Economic Specialization in the Early Bronze Age City of Tell es-Safi Using Isotopic Analysis of Ovicaprines

Summary

Early urban economies during the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant are often treated as if they relied upon locally-available food resources that were largely produced at the household level, such as the herding of domestic livestock around the periphery or territory of the city-state. In this paper, we investigate whether the pastoral component of economies was a small-scale local affair or was conducted remotely, which would have involved productive specialists such as nomadic pastoralists, through the analysis of carbon, oxygen and strontium isotope samples of an expanded sample of ovicaprine dental remains from the Early Bronze Age deposits of Tell-es Safi/Gath, Israel. The data are suggestive of spatial separation of animals from the settlement as the results indicate that the animals were reared a substantial distance from the site and only brought into the local territory immediately prior to slaughtering. Based on these data, we argue that pastoral production was a specialized feature of early urban economies in the southern Levant. Food production within early cities was not based on local holdings or small-scale herds by family units and there was a separate pastoral component conducted by specialists at a distance from the settlement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Applications of Isotope Research in Zooarchaeology

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