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.

在国家科学基金会博士的支持下。斯蒂芬·福尔科纳和帕特里夏·福尔将继续在约旦河谷进行考古研究。他们将在 Tell Abu en-Ni'aj 遗址进行一季的挖掘，然后进行两季的分析工作。与同样在 NSF 支持下挖掘的 Tell el-Hayat 遗址一起，Drs.福尔科纳和福尔将能够追踪大约一段时间内定居点、经济和社会组织的变化。 800年的时间跨度。早期的 Tell Abu en-Ni'aj 记录了早期青铜时代的末期，而 Tell el-Hayyat 在随后的青铜时代中期被占领。这两个地点都相对较小，代表乡村“城镇”而不是中心城市首府，因此有可能揭示那个时代绝大多数民众所生活的世界。为了完成这一大规模的水平挖掘工作。这些将产生大量花卉、动物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。由此收集的数据将与来自Tell el-Hyyat的类似材料进行比较。虽然，通过时间的长镜头，人们可以追踪社会复杂性日益增加的轨迹，最终导致近东“文明”的出现，但现实中的过程要复杂得多，而且人们知之甚少。变化不是单向的，而是以复杂性增加和减少的循环为特征。青铜时代末期特别令人感兴趣，因为它证明了复杂性的急剧下降，并且通常被称为“黑暗时代”。在随后的青铜时代中期，城市和大型政治实体再次出现。将这两个站点放在一起允许博士。 Falconer 和 Fell 检查整个周期。初步数据表明，这些时期具有很强的连续性，并表明小型定居点保留了很大程度的独立性，并采取了弹性策略，缓冲了它们免受变化的影响。拟议的研究将使研究人员能够详细调查这一过程。由于多种原因，这项工作很重要。它将为近东复杂社会的兴起提供新的线索，并为许多考古学家提供感兴趣的数据。由于这项研究是在强大的生态背景下进行的，因此它还将深入了解人类如何应对气候变化以及他们如何适应和影响周围的环境。