Early Bronze Age Economies along the Dead Sea, Jordan: Reconstructing Agricultural Practices through Integrated Stable Isotope Analysis and Macrobotanical Study

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists such as Chesson (2019) have suggested the need for a more nuanced characterization of Early Bronze Age urbanism in the Southern Levant, one that embraces local variations as part of a regional EBA ideological package. Local agricultural economies would have included diverse techniques and scales of crop husbandry strategies performed at the community and/or household levels. This paper investigates agricultural evidence from the EBIII site of Numayra (ca. 2850–2550 cal BC) in Jordan using the combined approach of stable isotope analysis and macrobotanical study to assess investments in cereal cultivation over time and between household clusters. Several primary crop storage deposits containing carbonized barley and emmer wheat grains were sampled from residential spaces at Numayra to determine whether households may have had varying access to favorable arable land and water resources. Stable isotope analysis has revealed that the crops stored within some of the storage features were better watered than others, and that barley was selectively grown in drier fields than wheat. This work provides some insight into how a small grouping of households may have negotiated access to local agricultural resources as part of their experience residing in a fortified EBIII community along the Dead Sea.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33382