Doc Savage's Archaeology Projects in Israel

Bronze Age Urbanism Project

I am involved in a study of Bronze Age urbanism in the Southern Levant with Dr. Steven Falconer. For this project I developed the computer-based Monte Carlo methods of analyzing rank-size site distributions that are described in the abstracts section of my page.  These statistical methods address critical issues of coverage and the composition of the underlying population of sites from which the actual data have been recovered as a sample of some unknown, but generally estimated, proportion. Probability estimates are developed empirically, based on a long series of random runs, in which a group of sites equal to the number actually found are drawn from a log-nomal site universe that has the characteristics which the researcher specifies. The number of sites in the data universe is equal to the number of observed sites, divided by the sample proportion, and the largest observed site is used as the largest in the data universe.

The results suggest that Levantine coastal plain urbanism is different in scale, and in kind, than southern Mesopotamian urban expressions. And, we show that urban expressions are dramatically different among the coastal plain, central hills, and Jordan valley regions of the Southern Levant.  Far from being simply a case of Mesopotamian urbanism at a reduced scale, each sub-region of the Southern Levant shows its own unique trajectory of urban growth and decline. In addition, there are dramatic differences in the degree of "system integration," or social-economic factors, that held the urban and rural places together. Our results further suggest that the rural component of the settlement system may have been organized somewhat independently of the larger, urban centers. 

Through a series of iterations at scales that decrease from the entire region to small groups of sites, this approach may be combined with cluster analysis of site locations to explore the growth and spread of urbanization in different "city-states" in the Levantine Bronze Age. Some of our initial rank-size analyses indicated that the sub-regions of the Southern Levant may each have contained several smaller settlement systems in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. I used cluster analysis on site locations to separate the sites in the three sub-regions into smaller groups, and then ran the Monte-Carlo RankSize simulation on them again. This work is still in progress, but the results are quite exciting so far. 

One difficulty of working with these data from the Early and Middle Bronze Ages is that there are very few texts from the region in the Middle Bronze Age, and none in the Early Bronze Age. A nagging question has been whether our statistical methods can reproduce site clusters that reflect real social-political units in these remote eras, or whether they are simply statistical creations. We have developed a test of our spatial-statistical approach that compares Late Bronze Age settlement data with historical sources, such as the Egyptian Amarna Texts and the Old Testament. Shlomo Bunimovitz worked out what he felt were accurate boundaries between city-states in Late Bronze Age Canaan, based on these and other texts. I have compiled a list of site locations from the same period, and performed a cluster analysis on them, in the same way we have done it for the Early and Middle Bronze Ages. Then, by superimposing the cluster map on the boundaries ascertained by Bunimovitz, it is possible to see that there is a remarkable correspondence between the two. Thus, our statistical methods are probably able to recreate a real social landscape in the earlier, ahistorical periods.
 
 

Publications Related to this Research:

• i.p.  The Bronze Age Political Landscape of the Southern Levant. In States and the Landscape, edited by S. Falconer and C. Redman. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. With Steven Falconer.
  
  
• 2007  The Early Bronze Age City States of the Southern Levant: Neither Cities Nor States. In Crossing Jordan: North American Contributions to the Archaeology of Jordan, pp. 285-297, edited by T. Levy, M. Daviau, R. Younker, and M. Shaer. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd. With S. Falconer and T. Harrison.
  
  
• 2003  Statistical and Historical Inference of Late Bronze Age Polities in the Southern Levant. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 330:31-45.  With Steven E. Falconer.
  
  
• 1997  Assessing Departures from Log-normality in the Rank-Size Rule. Journal of Archaeological Science 24:233-244.
  
  
• 1995  Heartlands and Hinterlands: Alternative Trajectories of Early Urbanization in Mesopotamia and the Southern Levant. American Antiquity 60(1): 37-58. With Steven E. Falconer.