ABSTRACT
The southern Levant has been witness to a series of technological revolutions that have had a profound effect on the evolution of societies beginning in the Neolithic period with the origins of agriculture and extending up to the present with new developments in agro-technology and other fields. However, like the Neolithic Revolution (Childe 1952) and the domestication of plants and animals and the Secondary Products Revolution (Levy 1983; Sherratt 1981) when the secondary products (milk, wool, hair, and traction) of herd animals were first intensively exploited, the technological and social changes brought forward by the discovery of metallurgy were equally profound. The southern Levant, especially Jordan, Israel, and Palestine, were home to one of the earliest centers of metal production in the world dating back to the Chalcolithic period, ca. 4500–3600 bce (Hauptmann 1989; Levy and Shalev 1989; Rothenberg and Merkel 1998). The region was ‘pre-adapted’ to be a center of ancient metal production due to the large deposits of cupriferous ore bearing deposits situated along the margins of Wadi ‘Arabah that separates the modern countries of Jordan and Israel.
