Daily Food Practices and the Materiality of the Early Bronze Age Kitchen in the Southern Levant

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Early Bronze Age (EB IB-III, 3300–2500 BCE) in the southern Levant is marked by significant social, political, and economic changes, as people aggregated into large, often fortified settlements for the first time in the region. These new sites differ in size, environmental setting, and in the degree of social differentiation and political organization. But were these differences reflected in the material record of people’s day-to-day practices? Food production, storage, processing, and preparation were central parts of EB daily life, and many of these food-related practices took place within residential spaces. Using evidence from EB houses excavated at Numayra, Jordan and comparing those to residential contexts from other EB settlements in the Southern Levant, this paper investigates the ‘EB kitchen’. I argue that, despite differences in size and social, political, and economic organization, the tools, installations, vessels, and features used for food related practices remained markedly similar in residential spaces at both large and smaller EB sites, suggesting that EB people shared a food habitus throughout the Southern Levant.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38827.0