Reassessing Herd Management Strategies in the Early Bronze Age of Southern Israel-Palestine: Preliminary Insights from Tell el-Hesi

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.

Current discussions of herd management strategies employed in the Early Bronze Age III (EB III) in southern Israel-Palestine are often painted with a generalized brush. However, emergent data from the early urban EB III site of Tell el-Hesi, Israel, suggests a site-level perspective is required, particularly during periods of social stress and urban development. Previous excavations at Tell el-Hesi in the 1970s revealed a portion of the EB IIIA fortification wall and a workshop/market quarter, and renewed excavations in 2023 uncovered a portion of an EB IIIA domestic neighborhood. This paper combines faunal data and new carbon and oxygen isotopic faunal data from the workshop/market quarter and new faunal data from the domestic neighborhood excavations to form a comprehensive understanding of herd management strategies employed at EB IIIA Tell el-Hesi. In comparison to other sites in the region, results indicate that a site-level perspective reveals a more diverse range of herd management strategies in the face of newly emergent urban living in southern Israel-Palestine than previously suggested. This paper is inspired by Richard Redding’s models of sheep/goat management, his repertoire of work on domesticated faunal remains, and the rise of social complexity in the Ancient Near East.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40383.0