The important Early Bronze Age site of Bab edh-Dhra, on the lisan near the Dead Sea in Jordan, was first excavated by Paul W. Lapp in the 1960s. The first volume of the Reports of the Expedition described the burial practices and artifacts revealed in the 1965-67 Bab edh-Dhra excavations directed by Lapp. This second volume reports on the four seasons of excavation, from 1975 to 1981, at the town site, directed by Walter E. Rast and R. Thomas Schaub. The stratigraphy and changing architectural practices of five major phases are fully documented and interpreted, with extensive plans and sections.

Jesus Christ in History and Scripture highlights two related bases for the current revolution in Jesus studies: (1) a critically-chastened world view that is satisfied with provisional results and (2) a creative (or "poetic") use of the sources of study of Jesus.

The change from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to one dependent upon farming constitutes a truly 'revolutionary' event in the human career. Most archaeologists agree that how ancient people organized their work and family groups was crucial to the success of early attempts at farming. Yet little serious attention has been paid to the social organization of labor in the prehistoric past. This book addresses that lacuna by investigating sexual divisions of labor. As a case study, Peterson chose the southern Levant of West Asia, where the world's first farming societies emerged some 10,000 years ago. Shattering long held assumptions about women's work that lead to generalizations about gender roles, Peterson shows that gender studies can be both scientific and thoroughly grounded in feminist theory.

This volume presents Paul W. Lapp's excavations at Bab edh-Dhra between 1965-1967, which concentrated on the cemetery of the site. This focus on the cemetery material has had the result that many came to associate Bab edh-Dhra with its tombs. Yet it is important in this volume on tomb material to stress that the latter is only one set of evidence at the site and that the cemetery remains need to be considered in relation to the data from the town site. The Bab edh-Dhra town site excavations are covered in volume 2 of this series "Reports of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain, Jordan."

Like many modern-day Christians, Dr. Collins struggled with what seemed to be a clash between his belief in the Bible and the research regarding ancient history--a crisis of faith that inspired him to embark on an expedition that has led to one of the most exciting finds in recent archaeology.

Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East is among the first comprehensive treatments to present the diverse ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations memorialized and honored their dead, using mortuary rituals, human skeletal remains, and embodied identities as a window into the memory work of past societies. In six case studies teams of researchers with different skillsets—osteological analysis, faunal analysis, culture history and the analysis of written texts, and artifact analysis—integrate mortuary analysis with bioarchaeological techniques. Drawing upon different kinds of data, including human remains, ceramics, jewelry, spatial analysis, and faunal remains found in burial sites from across the region’s societies, the authors paint a robust and complex picture of death in the ancient Near East. Demonstrating the still underexplored potential of bioarchaeological analysis in ancient societies, Remembering the Dead in the Ancient Near East serves as a model for using multiple lines of evidence to reconstruct commemoration practices. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian societies, the archaeology of death and burial, bioarchaeology, and human skeletal biology.

The Southern Levant was a thriving centre of religious and cultural exchange during the Bronze Age. 'Early Bronze Age Goods Exchange in the Southern Levant' provides an overview of the sources and distribution of commodities. The book presents a study of key production centres and the process of purchase and exchange. The book establishes a theoretical framework - based in political economy, ethnoarchaeology and economic anthropology - for understanding the exchange of commodities in a precapitalist society. 'Early Bronze Age Goods Exchange in the Southern Levant' is unique in presenting archaeological sources and prehistoric economics through modern, notably Marxist, theories of human development.