ABSTRACT
The end of the 3rd millennium BCE in the Near East is marked by major shifts in the structure of urban society. In the southern Levant, virtually all cities were abandoned, and the urban system was replaced by villages. In earlier histories, this abandonment was seen as the result of invasions by the ostensibly nomadic Amorites (e.g., Albright 1949:82; Kenyon 1980:121, 145-147; for critical review see Richard 1980), and the period was often characterized as one of reversion to nomadic lifestyles, often encompassed under the rubric “semi-nomads” (e.g., Dever 1980; Richard 1980). In later revisions to these early syntheses, collapse was attributed to climatic perturbations imposed on socially precarious urban adaptations, especially tied to the 4.2K climatic event (2200 BCE), an episode marked not only by desiccation, but by environmental instability (e.g., A. Rosen 1995b, 2007:143). Decades of systematic archaeological survey and salvage work has resulted in the discovery of scores of villages and hamlets attributable to this period (e.g., Edelstein et al. 1998), not evident in earlier periods with emphases on tell archaeology. With these discoveries, the Intermediate Bronze Age 1 in the settled zone should be more characterized as a rural village system than a pastoral nomadic one, and thus the collapse should be seen as a regression from city to village rather than city to campsite. Most recently, re-evaluation of the radiocarbon sequence in the Southern Levant (Regev et al. 2012) suggests that the entire period began perhaps 200 years earlier than previously assumed and lasted longer than the assumed 200-300 years, casting some doubt on both the coincidence with the well-dated 4.2K event of rapid climate change (RCC) and the synchronisms with events in the rest of the Near East. However, the clear radiocarbon overlap between sites attributed to the Early Bronze Age III and some of those from the succeeding
Intermediate Bronze Age suggests that this work still demands review, critique, and full integration into the archaeological sequences (see Chapter 9 ).
