Tell el-Hayyat 2003 Overview

Final publication of archaeological investigations at Tell el-Hayyat, Jordan conducted in 1982, 1983 and 1985.
Steven Falconer and Patricia Fall

Tell el-Hayyat represents a modestly sized farming village (0.5 ha) amid the rich alluvial farmland of the Jordan Valley, approximately 7 km southwest of the ancient Pella (Palestine grid coordinates: 205 203). Life at Hayyat spanned the entire Middle Bronze Age, the heyday of early urbanism in the southern Levant: ca. 2000-1500 B.C. Since villages housed the vast majority of the Levant's Bronze Age population, Hayyat typifies agrarian village life in early civilizations, providing an especially valuable illustration of rural agrarian responses, to the rise of early cities. Few Levantine villages like Tell el-Hayyat have been excavated, fewer still have been published thoroughly.

While various aspects of the research from Tell el-Hayyat have been published as journal articles and book chapters, complete publication requires a final synthesis of this project's many contributions and insights. A White - Levy grant permits a culminating book-length compendium of the project's design, methods, data and interpretations to be published by Archaeopress (Oxford, England) in the widely disseminated British Archaeological Reports, International Series.
Our final volume, Bronze Age Rural Ecology and Village Structure at Tell elHayyat, Jordan will explore the foundations of early village life with attention to rural agrarian ecology, the behaviors of farming households and the roles of communal ritual. This book will distill the research orientation, methods, data and interpretations of the Tell el-Hayyat Project. Steven Falconer and Bonnie Magness-Gardiner directed the Tell el-Hayyat excavations, while Patricia Fall directed the Hayyat paleoecological investigations. Volume editors Falconer and Fall have assumed responsibility for final project publication, but will consult with Magness-Gardiner as necessary. Mary Metzger conducted the project's faunal analysis and will be a major contributor to the volume, especially regarding animal husbandry.

Most archaeological studies epitomize Bronze Age society in the southern Levant (i.e., the region of modem Israel, Palestine and western Jordan) in terms of the advent and florescence of urbanism. Along with the rise of state-level governments, questions of cities and city life constitute the standard paradigm for archaeological analyses of Near Eastern civilizations. However, the growth of cities also necessarily entailed the development of rural communities, which housed the vast majority of ancient Near Eastern populations.

Unfortunately, vitally important urban/rural relations are inferred largely from data excavated from large tell sites, and from written documents that virtually never voice rural points of view. In the southern Levant, the Middle Bronze Age witnessed the apex of pre-Roman urbanized society. Our investigations at the Middle Bronze Age village of Tell el-Hayyat provide a detailed archaeological perspective on rural communities during the growth of urbanism and the formative roles they played in the rise of Near Eastern civilization.

The final publication of Tell el-Hayyat will provide an unusually detailed glimpse of household agricultural subsistence and village social structure. This volume will spotlight the rural foundations of Bronze Age society by specifying the many social and economic dimensions in which village life was unexpectedly complex, and essential to the development of urbanism in the southern Levant.