New Horizons in the Study of the Early Bronze III and Early Bronze IV of the Levant

The "radiocarbon revolution" has profoundly altered traditional historical frameworks in the Near East. Addressing the ramifications of the new, higher radiometric (14C) chronology, as well as the impact of new excavations and expanded data sets on third-millennium BCE studies, this volume brings together twenty-three essays covering a diverse array of topics, such as urbanism, heterarchy, nomadism, ruralism, terminology, and cultural continuity/discontinuity. Along with the radical two-hundred-year shift to a higher chronology for the southern Levant, the fast pace of discoveries throughout the Levant and Egypt necessitates constant updating and reevaluation. The principal consequence of these data for scholarship is the realignment of historical correlations between the southern and northern Levant in the EB III-IV periods, and between the southern Levant and the Egyptian Late Dynastic and Old Kingdom periods. But the contributions to this volume also detail new and tantalizing information from excavated sites that may not fit into traditional models of the Early Bronze III-IV periods. As this collection of articles attests, in light of new data, scholarly views on EB III urbanism and the rise of cities and states and on EB IV pastoral nomadism in the southern Levant need to be reevaluated. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship from an international group of specialists in the Early Bronze Age in the northern and southern Levant, this volume is an essential handbook for Early Bronze Age studies.