Shaped, Molded, and Buried: Differential Access to Ceramics in Early Bronze Age I Bab adh-Dhra’, Jordan

Summary

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

New ways of looking at old evidence can help develop a better understanding of the relationship between early urbanism and social differentiation in the ancient Near East. In the Southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age I (c. 3700-3000 BCE), the site of Bab adh-Dhra’ was a center for mortuary activities for EBA communities. Bab adh-Dhra’ is an important case study for archaeologists interested in the earliest expressions of differentiation and social inequality during the rise of urbanism in the Early Bronze Age. The sustained use of shaft tombs and later development of charnel houses by villagers across generations illustrates major changes in how people dealt with their dead and defined social relations. In this current study thousands of ceramic vessels from over one hundred EB I tombs were statistically analyzed using size, form, function, ware patterns, fabric, and manufacture to compare the differential access to ceramic funerary assemblages across tombs. This research contributes to the wider discussion of how and why differentiation existed, how individuals asserted their own agency in the face of long-standing mortuary tradition, and how differentiation and social inequality developed in the Southern Levant during the Early Bronze Age.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40061.0