Madaba Plains Project: A Preliminary Report of the 1987 Season at Tell El-\u27Umeiri and Vicinity

The survey and excavations at Tell el-\u27Umeiri and its hinterland in 1987 focused on the processes of five cycles of economic, social, and agricultural intensification and abatement from the Early Bronze Age to modern times. In the hinterland three surveys (land use, seasonal site, permanent settlement) and a hinterland excavation at Rujm Selim, an Iron II and Hellenistic agricultural complex, were conducted. Most of the work focused on agricultural activity patterns. On the tell six fields of excavation studied occupational activity patterns from EB III to the Byzantine period with a hiatus from late Persian to late Roman, except for the water source, which produced finds from the Roman period. The continued occupation of the tell through the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, a time when the rest of the region is in abatement, provided a chance to examine an exception to the cyclic pattern of lifestyle so prominent in most of central Transjordan