There and back again: A zooarchaeological perspective on Early and Middle Bronze Age urbanism in the southern Levant

Multiple arguments for or against the presence of ‘urban’ settlements in the Early Bronze Age of the southern Levant have identified the need to compare these settlements against their rural hinterlands through multiple lines of evidence. This meta-analysis of zooarchaeological data from the region compares and identifies patterns of animal production, provisioning and consumption between the supposed “urban” and rural sites of the southern Levant from the Early Bronze (EB) against the (more widely recognised urban) Middle Bronze (MB) Ages. It also identifies distinct and regionally specific patterns in animal production and consumption that can be detected between urban and rural sites of the southern Levant. The taxonomic and age profiles from EB Ia and Ib sites do not demonstrate any urban versus rural differentiation patterning, even though fortifications appear in the EB Ib. Beginning in the EB II and clearly visible in the EB III, there is differentiation between rural and urban sites in the taxonomic and age proportions. Differentiation is repeated in the MB II. The clear differentiation between “urban” and rural zooarchaeological assemblages from the EB II-III and MB suggest that rural sites are provisioning the larger fortified settlements. This pattern indicates that these sites are indeed urban in nature, and these societies are organized at the state-level. From the EB II onwards, there is a clear bias in the large centres towards the consumption of cattle and of subadult sheep and goats with a corresponding bias in smaller rural sites towards the consumption of adult sheep and goats and a reduced presence of cattle. After the emergence of this differential pattern, it disappears with the decline in social complexity at the end of the Early Bronze Age, only to come ‘back again’ with the re-emergence of urban settlement systems in the Middle Bronze Age.