ABSTRACT
A recently published cartoon showed the interior of a bar with two rustic individuals imbibing and conversing. The caption read, ‘I miss the security of a walled city’. If there had been taverns in the EB IV/IB period this scene might have been a common one throughout the southern Levant. The walled town/urban phase with its concomitant sense of comparative security provided by the huge bastions at Ai and Yarmuth, Tannach and Bab edh-Dhrac had given way, in current reconstructions, to a predominantly rural culture with unwalled villages and an uneasy truce between settled peoples and wandering pastoralists and uprooted segments of the population. One clear break from this pattern, often seen as an isolated example, is the walled site of Kh. Iskander. Recently it has been suggested that Kh. Iskander ‘cannot be considered an exception to the rule of undefended villages in Jordan during the EB IV’ (Palumbo 2001, 243). Some sites in northern Jordan, such asjabal el-Rahil and Ar-Reseifeh are described by Palumbo as possibly fortified (Palumbo 2001, 241) and he further argues that ‘new research is needed to understand both the pattern of fortified settlements and their significance in a political and economic structure’ (Palumbo 2001, 243).
