Abstracts of Selected Articles

Statistical and Historical Inference of Late Bronze Age Polities in the Southern Levant.  Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 330:31-45 (February 2003).  With Steven E. Falconer.

The Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500-1200 B.C.) marks the earliest opportunity to apply substantial historical archives to the inference of spatially-defined polities in the southern Levant. A series of analyses of the Amarna Letters suggest numerous, small, bellicose "city-states" differing considerably in political prominence and demographic composition. We propose quantitative methods for analyzing archaeological settlement data to explore the spatial configuration of Late Bronze Age polities and their varying hierarchical structures. This approach provides an independent test of the historical method, which identifies capital cities and assumes the adherence of surrounding communities, by discerning polities from constellations of settlements, large and small, amid the abundantly available regional survey data for the southern Levant. We infer a political landscape that corresponds well with many aspects of historical reconstruction and propose new insights on the configuration and structure of Late Bronze Age polities. In particular, the readily apparent balkanization of the southern Levant is founded on significant structural variation between settlement and polities on the Coastal Plain, the Central Hills and the Jordan Rift. These results carry connotations for the study of earlier and subsequent political dynamics. Our methods and inferences are readily applicable to other cases of emergent political complexity in the southern Levant and elsewhere, particularly those lacking historical documentation. 

Descent Group Competition and Economic Strategies in Predynastic Egypt. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 16:226-268 (1997).

During the late fourth and early third millennia BC the pristine state of Egypt arose from a group of independent, Neolithic agricultural villages. The traditional explanation of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt is that Narmer conquered the Delta. A diachronic model based on inter-group competition suggests that a gradual coalescence of polities occurred. Chiefdoms at Nagada, Thinis, and Hierakonpolis are hypothesized to have formed in the middle Predynastic, and were then absorbed by the Hierakonpolis polity in the later fourth millennium. Still later, the Upper Egyptian polity absorbed the Deltaic one. If this model is accurate, it may be possible to identify intra-group competition at the level of a single polity (as well as inter-polity competition). Here, a mortuary analysis of the large Predynastic cemetery at Naga-ed-Der indicates that several descent groups used the facility simultaneously. Grave inventories indicate that the different groups experienced economic trajectories consistent with a competition model. At various times in the use of the cemetery, different groups displayed greater amounts of wealth, and it was derived from different sources. In the earliest phase of the cemetery, trade was directed toward the south. In the second phase evidence of outside trade vanishes at about the time of the Chalcolithic collapse in the Southern Levant. In the third phase, trade rebounds, but now it is oriented toward Syria and Mesopotamia. The outside contacts appear to have been an important element in elites' gaining and justifying positions of power. The political unification of Egypt may be the result of the efforts of Upper Egyptian chieftains to control the lucrative trade routes with Southwest Asia; the creation of an Egyptian state may then be seen as an unintended consequence, in that it resulted not from the tenuous political unification forged putatively by Narmer, but from a series of actions throughout the first two dynasties to retain and extend economic, political, and ideological control of the Nile Valley.

Toward an AMS Radiocarbon Based Chronology of Predynastic Egyptian Ceramics. In "Proceedings of the 17th International Radiocarbon Conference, Jerusalem." Radiocarbon. 43(3, part 3): 1255-1278.

The wide and varied connections between Israel and Egypt during the Early Bronze Age/Predynastic are frequently calibrated through ceramics that depend to a large degree on two seriation methods developed for Predynastic Egypt. Petrie's seriation technique and Kaiser's Stufe dating method utilize whole forms from mortuary contexts. Because of the ways they were developed and deployed in Predynastic research, a logical tautology exists that makes their usage highly problematic. Radiocarbon dating of the Predynastic is vital if we are to untangle existing ceramic chronologies. But up to now, almost all 14C dates have come from domestic contexts where whole vessels are not usually found and which differ significantly from cemeteries in their ceramic assemblages. A 14C-based chronology of whole forms in the Petrie Corpus is thus highly desirable, but has proven elusive until now. Samples of organic materials and Black-Topped Red Ware vessels from over 100 graves in the Predynastic Cemetery, N7000, at Naga-ed-Dêr have recently been submitted for dating with AMS methods, providing the first comprehensive 14C chronology of a Predynastic cemetery. The results are compared to a suite of recalibrated dates from Upper Egyptian Predynastic domestic contexts, which allows the 14C chronology for the region to be further refined. Absolute date ranges for a number of ceramic forms can be estimated for the first time, and results of early analysis are discussed.

AMS 14 Carbon Dates from the Predynastic Egyptian Cemetery, N7000, at Naga-ed-Der.  Journal of Archaeological Science 25:235-249.

Much of our understanding of early periods in Near Eastern archaeology depends on synchronisms with ancient Egypt. Chronological problems in the early Dynastic and Predynastic periods in Egypt indicate that a more accurate radiocarbon-based chronology would be desirable, but dates from the critical Predynastic period are not abundant at this time. Dates from Predynastic cemeteries are unfortunately rare, though reliable radiocarbon dates from these contexts are especially valuable because of their ability to tie relative ceramic chronologies to more recent radiocarbon chronologies from Predynastic settlement sites. Since most of the cemeteries were excavated nearly a century ago, though, the prospects for obtaining radiocarbon dates has seemed dim. This article reports the successful completion of twelve AMS radiocarbon assays on materials from the Predynastic cemetery at Naga-ed-Der.  Aggregated results indicate the cemetery was probably in use between about 3800 and 3090 BC. Four distinct use phases in the cemetery are discerned. The results constitute one of the first series of AMS dates from a suite of individual graves in a Predynastic cemetery where full artifact inventories are known. Not only are they important for themselves, but also for the comparative value the contents of the dated graves have with other interments at other sites. A comparison of these results with other radiocarbon dates from Upper Egypt establishes synchronisms between the cemetery and settlement sites, while helping to fill in gaps in the known radiocarbon chronology.

Assessing Departures from Log-normality in the Rank-Size Rule.  Journal of Archaeological Science 24(3):233-244 (1997).

Archaeologists have used the rank-size rule, and deviations from the it, to explain a number of different processes related to urbanism and social complexity. Frequently, hypotheses have been developed to account for these processes, and they depend on the existence of primate or convex settlement patterns for verification. When the rank-size rule has been used in these cases, most of the time no effort has been made to determine whether the observed settlement system is significantly different than the expected distribution; the two distributions are simply examined and a judgement is made. Some studies have used the Kolomogorov-Smirnov (K-) test to verify the statistical significance. The K- test is not appropriate for a number of reasons, which will be scribed in this paper. Here, a Monte-Carlo method is presented; it empirically determines the probability that an observed Kolomogorov value may be equalled or exceeded in a random draw of sites from a population which conforms to the rank-size rule. This method allows statistical significance to be assessed for rank-size studies in settlement archaeology for the first time.  Data from a series of Chalcolithic through Middle Bronze IIB/C sites in the Levantine coastal plain are examined with the simulation. The results indicate that, except for the Early Bronze III period, all of the periods examined present significant departures from the rank-size rule. Rank-size plots of the verified distributions indicate the possible existence of a relatively constant rural component in the coastal plain, which exhibits a central-place like distribution. Superimposed on this low-level rural component is a higher level urban distribution, which can be seen to develop, collapse, and re-develop during the periods in question, providing exciting new insights into the nature of Bronze Age urbanism in the Levant.

The Status of Women in Predynastic Egypt as Revealed through Mortuary Analysis. In Diverse Approaches to the Study of Gender: Insights from Anthropological and Classical Archaeology, edited by A. Rautman. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. (1998).

Gerda Lerner's ground-breaking book, The Creation of Patrimony, documents a process by which the status of women was eroded in the ancient Near East, beginning with the adoption of agriculture, culminating in the establishment of patrimonial societies during the formation of states.  Such processes are well documented in Neolithic and later Mesopotamia, and Lerner believes them to be universal in scope, although others have stressed that the circumstances will be different in specific situations. Egypt presents intriguing departures from Lerner's time frame. Mortuary evidence presented here from the Predynastic (4th millennium BC) cemetery at Naga-ed-Der fails to indicate significant differences in female and male graves in a number of data domains, including grave architecture, grave plundering, and ritual paraphernalia. Interestingly, the procedure used here to read idealized social roles from the mortuary record shows that females are interred with combinations of artifact types which signal more roles than do male interments. The shift in women's status which is documented by Lerner seems to have begun somewhat later in Egypt, probably beginning in the Protodynastic and Archaic periods (late 4th to mid-3rd millennium BC). The timing is probably related to the differences between segmentary states, such as those found in Mesopotamia, and the territorial Egyptian state.

Heartlands and Hinterlands: Alternative Trajectories of Early Urbanization in Mesopotamia and the Southern Levant. American Antiquity 60(1):37-58 (1995). With Steven E. Falconer.

Comparative rank-size analyses reveal highly variable courses of urbanization in ancient Mesopotamia and the Southern Levant during the fourth through early second millennia B.C. Traditional rank-size methods do not consider the effects of archaeological sampling. Therefore, we propose a revised approach based on Monte Carlo simulation which incorporates site recovery rates and demonstrates the advantages of "full-coverage" survey. We distinguish the rapid development of urban primacy in Southern Mesopotamia's heartland (Adams 1981) from the more static rural integration of the Diyala hinterland (Adams 1965). In contrast, Bronze Age urbanization in the Southern Levant describes a mosaic of urban and rural systems following independent trajectories. We call for greater attention to small sites, which often define the shape of rank-size distributions. Our approach illuminates modest cases of urbanization in terms of structure, rather than simply reduced scale, and avoids a tendency to categorize such cases as derivative.