10 research outputs found
The local iron age pottery from selected strata at Tel Yin'am, eastern lower Galilee, Israel
Tel Yinâam and nearby Khirbet Beit Gan are the only excavated sites in the
Yavneâel Valley, which constituted part of an ancient international highway that
connected the hinterland of the Hauran (modern-day Syria) with the Mediterranean
coast. As one of the few multi-occupational, small rural sites excavated in the Eastern
Lower Galilee, Tel Yinâam, which was occupied intermittently from the Neolithic
period to the Roman period (6500 BCE-325 CE), provides a critical link in the
occupation history and material culture of northern (modern-day) Israel.
Concentrating on critical selected Iron Age strata (1200-732 BC), this study
focuses on the mostly unpublished domestic pottery assemblages, subjecting the
various ceramic forms to classification and development analysis, and comparing
them to contemporary pottery assemblages from proximate and distant, rural and
urban sites in Cisjordan and Transjordan. Through diachronic and synchronic
analyses, I succeeded in: 1) developing a picture of the ceramic history of domestic
types at Tel Yinâam during the Iron Age; 2) providing both relative and absolute dates
for this ceramic assemblage; 3) placing the assemblage into the broader ceramic
context of the Iron Age in northern Cisjordan and Transjordan; 4) highlighting the
important role of roads and ancient highways and how they impacted on the history of
Tel Yinâam and its material culture in the Iron Age, thereby closing a gap in the
knowledge of the history of rural life and culture in the Yavneâel Valley in the Iron Age; and 5) gaining an understanding of the approximately 500-year history of
consistent and changing points of contact between Tel Yinâam and other sites that lay
along the highways traversing the northern Lower Galilee.Middle Eastern Studie