Rural Responses to Early Urbanism: Village Economy and Ecology in the Jordan Valley

农村对早期城市化的反应：约旦河谷的乡村经济和生态

• 批准号: 9904536
• 负责人: Steven Falconer
• 金额: $ 17.92万
• 依托单位: Arizona State University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1999
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1999-09-15 至 2003-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9904536&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Rural; Responses; Early; Urbanism; Village

With support from the National Science Foundation Drs. Stephen Falconer and Patricia Fall will continue their archaeological research in the Jordan Valley. They will conduct one season of excavation at the site of Tell Abu en-Ni'aj and follow this with two seasons of analytic work. Together with the adjacent site of Tell el-Hayyat, also excavated with NSF support, Drs. Falconer and Fall will be able to trace changes in settlement, economy and social organization over a ca. 800 year time span. The earlier Tell Abu en-Ni'aj documents the terminal period of the Early Bronze Age while Tell el-Hayyat was occupied during the succeeding Middle Bronze Age. Both sites are relatively small and represent rural "towns" rather than central urban capitals and therefore have the potential to shed light on the world in which the vast majority of the populace of these times lived. To accomplish this large scale horizontal excavations will be conducted. These will yield large samples of floral, faunal and other cultural remains and also permit examination of the spatial organization of this small village site. The data thus collected will be compared from similar classes of material from Tell el-Hyyat.While, through the long lens of time, one can trace a trajectory of increasing social complexity in which culminated in the emergence of Near Eastern "civilization", the process in reality is both much more complicated and poorly understood. Change was not unidirectional but characterized by cycles of increasing and decreasing complexity. The terminal Bronze Age is of particular interest because it evidenced a sharp decline in complexity and is often referred to as a "dark age." In the succeeding Middle Bronze Age cities and large political entities emerged once again. Taken together the two sites allow Drs. Falconer and Fell to examine the entire cycle. Preliminary data indicate a strong degree of continuity across these periods and suggest that small settlements retained a substantial degree of independence and adapted resilient strategies which buffered them against change. The proposed research will permit the investigators to investigate this process in detail.This work is important for several reasons. It will shed new light on the rise of complex society in the Near East and provide data of interest to many archaeologists. Because the research is set in a strong ecological context it will also offer insight into how humans respond to climatic change and how they adapted to and affected their surroundings.

在国家科学基金会的支持下，史蒂芬·法尔科纳博士和帕特里夏·法尔博士将继续在约旦谷进行考古研究。他们将在Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj遗址进行一个季节的挖掘，然后进行两个季节的分析工作。与邻近的Tell el-Hayyat遗址一起，也是在NSF的支持下挖掘的，Falconer博士和Fall博士将能够追踪大约800年时间跨度内定居点、经济和社会组织的变化。早些时候的Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj记录了青铜时代早期的末期，而Tell el-Hayyat则被占领在随后的中期青铜时代。这两个遗址都相对较小，代表的是农村“城镇”，而不是中心城市的首府，因此有可能揭示这个时代绝大多数人口生活的世界。为了实现这一目标，将进行大规模的水平挖掘。这些将产生大量的花卉、动物群和其他文化遗迹样本，并允许检查这个小村庄遗址的空间组织。这样收集的数据将与来自Tell el-Hyyat的类似类别的材料进行比较。虽然通过时间的长镜头，人们可以追踪到社会复杂性不断增加的轨迹，在这个轨迹中，最终出现了近东“文明”，但现实中的过程要复杂得多，而且人们对此知之甚少。变化不是单向的，而是以复杂性增加和减少的循环为特征的。晚期青铜时代特别令人感兴趣，因为它证明了复杂性的急剧下降，并经常被称为“黑暗时代”。在接下来的中期青铜时代，城市和大型政治实体再次出现。这两个网站加在一起，让法尔科纳和费尔博士得以检查整个周期。初步数据表明，在这些时期有很强的连续性，并表明小定居点保持了相当程度的独立性，并采取了适应变化的战略。这项拟议的研究将允许调查人员详细调查这一过程。这项工作之所以重要，有几个原因。它将为近东复杂社会的崛起提供新的线索，并提供许多考古学家感兴趣的数据。由于这项研究是在强烈的生态背景下进行的，它还将为人类如何应对气候变化以及他们如何适应和影响周围环境提供洞察力。