ABSTRACT
Most studies of Israelite ethnicity base their analysis on a site level, i.e., identifying inhabitants of a particular site as members of one group. During the Late Bronze Age Canaan was an Egyptian province. The locations and material remains of the Iron I agricultural villages indicate a rather different lifestyle from that of the Late Bronze Age, the settlements of which were concentrated mainly in the valleys and plains and were highly stratified. The Iron Age settlements were rural and concentrated in an area that was relatively uninhabited in preceding centuries. Their inhabitants lived in a new type of building, called the three- or four-room house. Until 1990s, scholarly consensus held that these settlers constituted 'early Israel', corresponding to the period of the Judges in the Hebrew Bible. This concept was based on the reasonable assumption that the settlement of the Israelite tribes as mentioned in the Hebrew Bible was synonymous with the Iron I material remaining uncovered by archaeologists.
