The Agricultural Economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant: Contrasting Preliminary Archaeobotanical Data from Tel Abel Beth Maacah and Khirbat al-Balu’a

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The agricultural economy of the Iron Age Southern Levant remains underexplored archaeobotanically, especially at an integrated, regional level. The data that is available suffers from few abundance datasets and is often difficult to access or unpublished. Out of 26 Iron Age sites with available data, only 6 have abundance values and other quantitative measures. This paper will give a regional analysis of the agricultural economy during the Southern Levantine Iron Age (1200–586 BCE) by contrasting preliminary data from two sites: Tel Abel Beth Maacah (ABM) and Khirbat al-Balu’a (Balu’a). The preliminary samples presented come from domestic contexts, specifically surfaces, ovens, and pits. Agricultural practices are inferred from ubiquity, proportion, and CA at the intra and inter-site levels. These practices will then be related to environmental (e.g. annual precipitation, location, and elevation), political (centralized vs. decentralized), and temporal (e.g. Iron I vs. Iron II) factors. Preliminary results show a difference between the sites from annual precipitation, which is consistent with prior research in Southwest Asia (Smith and Munro 2009; Vermeersch et al. 2021). The results from these sites will then be integrated with the available data to present a regional archaeobotanical picture of the Iron Age Southern Levantine agricultural economy.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37207.0