ABSTRACT
Using as a point of departure the widely-accepted geographical and cultural distinctions between the post-Early Bronze Age cultures and their settlement patterns in the northern and southern Levant, this paper addresses a sharply debated issue concerning the justification of the term ‘EB IV’ for the late third millennium bc in the southern Levant. It will be argued that the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the chrono-spatial analyses of various excavations and surveys conducted over more than fifty years in the coastal plain of Israel is that the most appropriate designation for this region in the post-Early Bronze Age III, and accordingly for most of the southern Levant, is the ‘Intermediate Bronze Age’. This term was first suggested by R. H. Smith (1962, 10). Our conclusion stems not only from an analysis of the various components of the material culture prevailing in the late third millennium bc in the southern Levant, a tool used by many researchers trying to cope with the terminology problem (see most recently Bunimovitz and Greenberg 2004), but also from consideration of such temporal factors as: the period of time that elapsed between the full disintegration and abandonment of the EB III urban settlement system in the coastal plain and the emergence of a new, non-urban settlement system — called henceforth the Intermediate Bronze Age — on the one hand, and the length of time between the abandonment of this late third millennium rural system and the first appearance in the coastal plain of a new settlement system which rapidly crystallised into a vigorous urban culture, designated the Middle Bronze Age.
