SEEDS OF CIVILIZATION - BRONZE-AGE RURAL ECONOMY AND ECOLOGY IN THE SOUTHERN LEVANT

This paper considers the economic and environmental impacts of emergin g regional commerce that accompanied the rise and collapse of early Ne ar Eastern urbanism. We integrate regional data on settlement and vege tation with detailed evidence of rural agriculture from two Bronze Age villages in the Jordan Valley. This approach is explicitly rural, in light of the largely rural character of Levantine civilization, and in response to more orthodox analytical perspectives focused on the firs t cities. Long-standing interest in the advent of agriculture now reve als that intensive localized depletion of woodland resources followed the aggregation of sedentary agrarian communities in the eighth throug h sixth millennia B.C., while the development of specialized pastorali sm established one potential source of more extensive, subsequent defo liation. We argue, however, that regional human impacts on Levantine v egetation were triggered only with the genesis of Bronze Age cities an d urbanized economies in the third and second millennia B.C. Thereafte r, these regional impacts molded an ever-shifting mosaic of anthropoge nic and natural landscapes. Rank-size analysis illustrates the modestl y integrated, largely rural nature of Bronze Age settlement in the sou thern Levant. In this context, Tell Abu en-Ni`aj and Tell el-Hayyat pr ovide appropriate examples of the resilient agrarian villages that per sisted through the dramatic collapse and rebirth of early Levantine ci ties. Excavated plant remains and animal bones show that their inhabit ants responded to the development of Bronze Age urbanism with a shift toward increased management of taxa with greater market potential, tem pered by some retention of local economic autonomy. Shifts to greater sheep husbandry and, most significantly, cultivation of orchard crops like olives, figs, and grapes, signal a second wave of economic innova tion that fundamentally altered the agricultural strategies of village farmers and their exploitation of the surrounding countryside. Thus t he mixed cultural and natural landscapes that have supported long-term agriculture in the Levant reflect a legacy of discontinuous changes i n rural economy and ecology in response to the waxing and waning of ur banized society and regional mercantile exchange.