ABSTRACT
Iron Age Israel was primarily a land of rural farmers and pastoralists living in small towns, villages, and homesteads organized through kinship networks of nuclear and extended families. These families were the locus of an economy based on reciprocity and organized around the agricultural calendar. Families also passed on knowledge of necessary skills for daily life, historical traditions, and cultic beliefs and practices. Their houses, built mostly of rough fieldstones, mudbricks, and small timbers and coated with mud plaster, were primarily of relatively small four-room and three-room types and probably at least partially two stories tall, possibly incorporating a courtyard. Heavier household items, permanent installations, and animals were kept on lower floors, while family living spaces were likely on an upper floor. Most settlements likely numbered from a few hundred people up to about a thousand.
