Cutting into Butchering Practices: Investigating Butchery Skill at an Early Bronze Age IIIA Urban Community along the Northern Negev

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The rise of urban living, particularly in the Southern Levant, often reflects a shift towards market economies and removed relationships with food– the transition from direct to indirect relationships with herding domesticated livestock. However, questions remain regarding if this transition from “direct” to “indirect” translated to all aspects of food production and processing behaviors. Such food processing behaviors that have received little attention in the Early Bronze Age III (2900-2500 BCE) is that of butchery specialization. Did the shift to urban living coincide with the specialization of animal processing, not just herd management? To answer this question, this research explored if butchery specialization can be detected from the cuts left behind on faunal remains. The Early Bronze Age III site of Tell el-Hesi serves as a unique case-study of an EB III site on the cusp of urban transition. Using a combined approach of morphological analyses under Dinolite magnification and SEM analysis, butchery skill level is evaluated and compared across the entire EB III faunal assemblage from Tell el-Hesi. Results show a high level of variation in butchery skill across the site, bringing to question how specialized processing activities were during the emergence of urban living.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52064