Tell Abu en-Ni'aj Overview

Steve Falconer
This proposal requests funding from the Shelby White — Leon Levy Program for Archaeological Publications to support the final publication of the archaeological excavations at Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj, Jordan directed by the applicants in 1985, 1996 and 2000. The ancient villagers of Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj witnessed the dramatic abandonment of Bronze Age towns and cities across the southern Levant in the late third millennium B.C. The excavated evidence from this village community, accordingly, provides a particularly detailed portrait of rural life during one of the most pronounced episodes of urban collapse in ancient southwestern Asia.

The Bronze Age represents a watershed in the development of civilization in the southern Levant and across the eastern Mediterranean and Near East. Archaeological investigations in Israel and Jordan have inferred a roughly two millennium trajectory of highly fluid social changes that proceed from the first towns of the Early Bronze Age to the city-states documented in the Amarna Letters of the Late Bronze Age. A notably turbulent stretch of Levantine social history featured the wholesale abandonment of towns during Early Bronze IV (traditionally dated ca. 2300/2200 2000 B.C.) and their equally dramatic rejuvenation in the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000 1500 B.C.).

Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj embodies the remains of a moderately sized Early Bronze IV farming village (2.5 ha) in the ghor, the rich alluvial farmland of the Jordan Valley, which overlooks the zor, or active floodplain of the Jordan River (see map of Ni‘aj’s location in Figure 1). Ethnographic analogy (e.g., Kramer 1982) suggests a population of approximately 500-600 inhabitants. The village lies approximately 1.5 km southwest of Middle Bronze Age Tell el-Hayyat, excavated previously by the applicants, and now fully published with the support of a grant from the White-Levy Program (Falconer and Fall 2006). Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj provides a remarkable opportunity to illustrate village life during urban collapse in contrast to Hayyat, a hamlet occupied amid the urbanization of the subsequent Middle Bronze Age. Only a few Early Bronze IV villages in the Levant have been excavated; fewer still have Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj’s long stratified record (seven Early Bronze IV strata) and its corresponding potential to contribute a fine-grained portrait of rural agrarian society during urban collapse.