Local Organization in Imperial Settings: Evidence from Late Antique and Middle Islamic Dhiban, Jordan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

One of the many intellectual legacies of Richard Redding’s work is his exploration of how local communities made provisioning decisions to meet both their own local needs and demands by political authorities. This paper examines these themes among inhabitants of ancient Dhiban, Jordan during the Late Antique (ca. 600 CE) and Middle Islamic (ca. thirteenth–fourteenth centuries CE) periods. During the Late Antique period, Jordan was under the nominal control of the Byzantine Empire and taxation burdens were organized and met at a local level. In the later Middle Islamic period, Dhiban was part of the Balqa region of the Mamluk Empire. Using zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical data from contexts dating to each period we explore the choices inhabitants made in agropastoral production and their integration in regional systems that brought crops and animal products from other areas of southwest Asia into their larders. These provide evidence of regional integration, predicated on both taxation demands and the exchange networks facilitated by these imperial entities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Breaking the Mold: A Consideration of the Impacts and Legacies of Richard W. Redding   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40040.0