ABSTRACT
About 1,500 sites of the EB IV period have been surveyed in the Negev and Sinai deserts: 1 c. 300 sites in northern Sinai (Oren and Yekutieli 1990), and c. 50 sites in the northern Sinai hills (Clamer and Saas 1977; Kloner 1980) during the 1970s; and c. 150 sites recorded in central Sinai by Rothenberg (who noted the strange phenomenon of the location of many sites in the hyper-arid area of the Badiat et-Tih, with no sites further south, despite the abundance of water sources: Rothenberg 1967, 1979). As for the Negev, the systematic surveys conducted there since the early 1950s (Glueck 1955a, 1955b; Aharoni et al. 1960; Kochavi 1967; Rothenberg 1967; Cohen 1981, 1985) and especially by the Negev Emergency Survey conducted by Cohen in the 1980s have yielded about 1000 EB IV sites (Haiman 1985, 1991, 1993, 1999; Lender 1990; Avni 1992; Rosen 1994).
