The historic event of the Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was recently identified in dozens of natural and geological climate proxies of the northern hemisphere. Although this climatic downturn was proposed as a major cause for pandemic and extensive societal upheavals in the sixth–seventh centuries CE, archaeological evidence for the magnitude of societal response to this event is sparse. This study uses ancient trash mounds as a type of proxy for identifying societal crisis in the urban domain, and employs multidisciplinary investigations to establish the terminal date of organized trash collection and high-level municipal functioning on a city-wide scale. Survey, excavation, sediment analysis, and geographic information system assessment of mound volume were conducted on a series of mounds surrounding the Byzantine urban settlement of Elusa in the Negev Desert. These reveal the massive collection and dumping of domestic and construction waste over time on the city edges. Carbon dating of charred seeds and charcoal fragments combined with ceramic analysis establish the end date of orchestrated trash removal near the mid-sixth century, coinciding closely with the beginning of the LALIA event and outbreak of the Justinian Plague in the year 541. This evidence for societal decline during the sixth century ties with other arguments for urban dysfunction across the Byzantine Levant at this time. We demonstrate the utility of trash mounds as sensitive proxies of social response and unravel the time–space dynamics of urban collapse, suggesting diminished resilience to rapid climate change in the frontier Negev region of the empire.
Massive settlement activity characterizes the arid Negev Highlands during the Intermediate Bronze Age (ca. 2500(ca. -1950. However, the underlying subsistence basis of this population is poorly understood. Recent microarchaeological work at Iron Age sites in the Negev Highlands has shown the potential for recovering direct evidence for subsistence practices through analysis of the microscopic plant remains in degraded animal dung. Following these methods, this paper reports new macro-and microarchaeological results of two sites near Mashabe Sade: a central Intermediate Bronze Age site, and for comparison, an ephemeral site in the immediate vicinity. At the central site, dated to the Intermediate Bronze Age by pottery and Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), evidence is absent for any sort of food production. In contrast, identification of ancient livestock dung at the ephemeral site suggests that it was sustained by animal husbandryyet the OSL results suggest these degraded dung deposits date to the Iron Age. Taken together, the Intermediate Bronze Age results from Mashabe Sade bolster arguments suggesting that central sites were supported mainly by trade and other alternative subsistence practices. Keywords Mashabe Sade, Negev Highlands, Intermediate Bronze Age, MicroarchaeologyAfter nearly a century of research, the Intermediate Bronze Age is still an enigmatic period in the settlement history of the southern Levant. Traditionally dated to ca. 2300-2000 BCE (e.g., Palumbo 2001), the Intermediate Bronze Age is characterized by the cessation of * Co-directors of the Negev Highlands Project. urban activity throughout the region, and a unique wave of settlement in the arid zones, especially the Negev Highlands. The impetus behind this dramatic settlement oscillation is unclear, though scholars have variously associated the phenomenon with changing political (e.g., Kochavi 1967), demographic (e.g., Kenyon 1951;Prag 1985), socio-economic (e.g., Dever 1980), and climatic conditions (e.g., Rosen 1987; Frumkin 2009).Until very recently, debate over the nature of the Intermediate Bronze Age had mellowed into a general consensus that the period was characterized in the north of modern Israel by a shift from urban life to rural agro-pastoralism (Finkelstein 1995: 88), and in the Negev, to subsistence practices characterized by animal husbandry and opportunistic agriculture (Dever 1985;Cohen 1999;Palumbo 2001). Hoards of copper ingots found at sites throughout the southern Levant, and the recent discovery of an Intermediate Bronze Age copper production centre in Wadi Faynan, suggest that a developed copper trade economy supported the Negev settlement system Recently, an analysis of radiocarbon determinations from secure archaeological contexts redated the Intermediate Bronze Age to ca. 2500-1950 BCE (Regev et al. 2012. This changes the equation between the Intermediate Bronze Age and Egyptian history and hence forces a re-evaluation of the Intermediate Bronze Age in general, and the role of Negev settlement systems wi...
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