ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides various outlooks on the Bronze and Iron Age animal husbandry in the Southern Levant. It discusses the most part data of sites in ancient Israel. The book comprises comprehensive theoretical discussion of economic strategies, a market economy and the survival subsistence strategy, pastoral-nomadism and sedentism. It demonstrates a taphonomic study carried out for the first time on a faunal assemblage from a tel site, investigating the entire vertical process starting with the live animal and ending at the zoo archaeological lab. The sagittal perspective represents a taphonomic study of the faunal assemblage from Stratum II at Tel Beer-Sheba. The ethnographic perspective provides us with data that cannot be obtained solely from faunal remains. The survival subsistence strategy rather than a market economy was paramount among most parts of the Southern Levantine population.
