Illustrated in b/w with 193 figures, 22 plates and 23 tables. This volume is the first in a planned series of final reports on the Archaeological Expedition to Khirbat Iskandar and its Environs, Jordan, begun in 1981 by Principal Investigator, Suzanne Richard of Gannon University. Khirbat Iskandar is an important Early Bronze Age site situated on the W di al-Wal north of Dhiban. Due to its extensive stratified Early Bronze IV (ca. 2300/2000 BCE) occupation on the tell, Khirbat Iskandar is a seminal site for the period. This volume focuses on the excavation of Area C from 1981-1987, where a gateway came to light. In a period known for one-phase sites and isolated cemeteries, the stratified remains at Khirbat Iskandar offer important data on rural complexity in a sedentary community of the late third millennium, BCE. The volume also includes the results of excavations in the contemporaneous cemeteries discovered in the environs of the site. Along with studies of stratigraphy, the environment, ground stone and other artifacts, faunal remains, skeletal remains from the tombs, and C14 determinations, there are quantitative and petrographic ceramic studies.

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.

Paperback reprint of the cloth original Winner of the 2004 Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association! Filling a gap in classroom texts, more than 60 essays by major scholars in the field have been gathered to create the most up-to-date and complete book available on Levantine and Near Eastern archaeology.