The Early Bronze Age I Tombs and Burials of Bâb edh-Dhrâ', Jordan, Reports of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain, Jordan, Volume 3. Donald J. Ortner and Bruno Frohlich.

2010 ◽  
Vol 357 ◽  
pp. 83-85
Author(s):  
Patricia Smith
Antiquity ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 74 (286) ◽  
pp. 786-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Phillips ◽  
Aaron Watson
Keyword(s):  

A fieldwalking project focused on the Neolithic/Early Bronze Age of northern Scotland investigates different regional traditions and changing relationships with ancestors.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Joy Kagan ◽  
Dafna Langgut ◽  
Elisabetta Boaretto ◽  
Frank Herald Neumann ◽  
Mordechai Stein

The history of lake-level changes at the Dead Sea during the Holocene was determined mainly by radiocarbon dating of terrestrial organic debris. This article reviews the various studies that have been devoted over the past 2 decades to defining the Dead Sea levels during the Bronze and Iron Ages (≃5.5 to 2.5 ka cal BP) and adds new data and interpretation. In particular, we focus on research efforts devoted to refining the chronology of the sedimentary sequence in the Ze'elim Gully, a key site of paleoclimate investigation in the European Research Council project titled Reconstructing Ancient Israel. The Bronze and Iron Ages are characterized by significant changes in human culture, reflected in archaeological records in which sharp settlement oscillations over relatively short periods of time are evident. During the Early Bronze, Intermediate Bronze, Middle Bronze, and Late Bronze Ages, the Dead Sea saw significant level fluctuations, reaching in the Middle Bronze an elevation of ≃370 m below mean sea level (bmsl), and declining in the Late Bronze to below 414 m bmsl. At the end of the Late Bronze Age and upon the transition to the Iron Age, the lake recovered slightly and rose to ≃408 m bmsl. This recovery reflected the resumption of freshwater activity in the Judean Hills, which was likely accompanied by more favorable hydrological-environmental conditions that seem to have facilitated the wave of Iron Age settlement in the region.


Author(s):  
K. O. Emery ◽  
David Neev

Discussion of Early Bronze cultural history at Bab edh-Dhr’a and Numeira sites east of the Lisan Peninsula and on the northeast flank of the Dead Sea south basin is guided mostly by Rast (1987) and Rast and Schaub (1974, 1978, 1980, and 1981). This epoch was divided by Rast and Schaub into two sections according to traditional archaeological chronology. The first section is the urban period of Bab edh-Dhr'a (4890 to 4340 B.P.) including Early Bronze I, II, and III. The second is the posturban period (4340 to 4190 B.P.), Early Bronze IV or the Intermediate Bronze age according to Kochavi (1967), Kenyon (1979), Gophna (1992), and R. Amiran and Kochavi (1985) as well as Middle Bronze I according to Albright (1962). Although no prominent cultural hiatus separates these two sections, the transition between them contains abundant indications of extensive destruction and fire events brought about by natural disasters such as earthquakes. Donahue (1980, 1981) considered that not just one but two severe earthquakes occurred, one about 4400 B.P. and the other 4350 B.P. Numeira was totally and finally abandoned after the second earthquake, whereas Bab edh-Dhr’a was reinhabited apparently as a result of conquest by seminomadic people of the same cultural background. This second earthquake probably was the one by which Sodom and Gomorrah were totally destroyed. Abrupt cultural changes also were recorded in the southeast Negev at Uvda Valley during transition from Early Bronze III to Middle Bronze I about 4300 B.P. These changes were from a gradually increasing population within a walled city having a life-style based on a combination of agriculture and animal husbandry into a more nomadic community with unfortified houses and primarily a grazing economy. According to Avner (1990, p. 133) “Subsequent to a brief climatic crisis at the end of the third millennium BC the climate improved, allowing the new culture to blossom in the desert.” This climatic crisis could have been extreme dryness. By the middle of the Intermediate Bronze age at about 4200 B.P., Bab edh-Dhr’a, the last Early Bronze site to survive was totally abandoned and the Dead Sea south basin remained basically unsettled for more than 1,500 years until Hellenistic time.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Cooney

Because of its diversity and visibility the mortuary record of the Early Bronze Age (2400–1500 cal. BC) has long dominated interpretation of that period in Ireland (e.g. Cooney and Grogan 1994; Waddell 1998; Brindley 2007) and burials from Bronze Age cemeteries represent over 70 per cent of the burial record from Irish prehistory (Murphy et al. 2010). The explosion of development-funded excavation in the period from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s provided a settlement balance to that picture and also evidence for additional cemeteries (e.g. Grogan et al. 2007; McQuade et al. 2009). This suggests that Early Bronze Age cemeteries served as local foci for communities. From the evidence of the numbers interred over a number of generations the dead buried in the cemeteries represent what Mary Helms (1998) has usefully called the ‘distinguished dead’ from communities, not the entire population. Treatment of the dead within the cemeteries is complex and there are clear indications of change over time. Interpretative models had associated inhumation with males and a broader shift over time from inhumation to cremation relying on a view of cremation and inhumation as opposed, separate mortuary rites (e.g. Mount 1997). However, the evidence indicates a much more complex set of pathways in the postmortem treatment of the dead in which cremation and inhumation were employed as complementary mortuary rites with an increasing focus on cremation over time (e.g. Cahill and Sikora 2011). This new picture has important implications for the increasing significance of the the pyre and the transformation of the dead (Mizoguchi 1993: 232). In looking at the period after 1500 cal. BC we see continuity in aspects of mortuary practice and use of sites, but in other ways mortuary practice changed dramatically. Cremation is now the dominant mortuary rite. Burial in the Middle and Late Bronze Age (down to 600 cal. BC) has been widely discussed as less visible, and hence much less important as an aspect of social behaviour (e.g. Cooney and Grogan 1994: 144). But it is more useful to think in terms of shifting emphases in mortuary practice. In a recent discussion Lynch and O’Donnell (2007: 107) have described this period as being characterized by ‘an incredibly intricate and variable physical treatment of the dead’.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 77-102
Author(s):  
Paweł Jarosz ◽  
◽  
Tomasz Boroń ◽  
Barbara Witkowska ◽  
Małgorzata Winiarska-Kabacińska ◽  
...  

The aim of this paper is to present the multidimensional characteristics of the feature number 4 at the site in Wilczyce located on the Sandomierz Upland. During exploration of the pit rich flint material, fragments of pottery vessels and animal bones were found and just above the bottom a “deposit” involved a human skull of the young female, two cattle mandibles, a sheep/goat tibia and astragalus, a damaged cattle scapula and radius, and a polishing stone were deposited. The C14 date obtained from the tooth from the cattle jaw was 3790 ± 35 BP. Based on the shape and the size of discovered feature it is possible to classify it as a typical storage pit but presence of “deposit” enable to postulate a ritual character of assemblage that reflect some kind of burial practices of the Mierzanowice culture. Rituals in the form of interring the dead or parts of their bodies can be found also in the Unietice culture so such features may indicate the emergence of a certain supra- -regional and cross-cultural trend in the early Bronze Age.


2009 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amos Frumkin

AbstractTrees growing on the Mt. Sedom salt diapir, at the southern Dead Sea shore, were swept by runoff into salt caves and subsequently deposited therein, sheltered from surface weathering. A subfossil Tamarix tree trunk, found in a remote section of Sedom Cave is radiocarbon dated to between ∼ 2265 and 1930 BCE. It was sampled in 109 points across the tree rings for carbon and nitrogen isotopes. The Sedom Tamarix demonstrates a few hundred years of 13C and 15N isotopic enrichment, culminating in extremely high δ13C and δ15N values. Calibration using modern Tamarix stable isotopes in various climatic settings in Israel shows direct relationship between isotopic enrichment and climate deterioration, particularly rainfall decrease. The subfossil Tamarix probably reflects an environmental crisis during the Intermediate Bronze Age, which subsequently killed the tree ∼ 1930 BCE. This period coincides with the largest historic fall of the Dead Sea level, as well as the demise of the large regional urban center of the 3rd millennium BCE. The environmental crisis may thus explain the archaeological evidence of a shift from urban to pastoral culture during the Intermediate Bronze Age. This was apparently the most severe long-term historical drought that affected the region in the mid-late Holocene.


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