The important Early Bronze Age site of Bâb edh-Dhrâ’, 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 1975–81, at the town site, directed by Walter E. Rast and R. Thomas Schaub. It focuses on the lifeways of the Early Bronze Age peoples who inhabited the site during the Early Bronze Age. The stratigraphy and changing architectural practices of five major phases are fully documented and interpreted, with extensive plans and sections. Alternating chapters trace the development of the ceramic sequences, accompanied by innovative statistical analyses of the wares, forms, types, and function of the town assemblage. The results of the ceramic studies are compared to the contemporary cemetery ceramic sequences and other important excavated Early Bronze Age sites such as Arad, Jericho, Ai, Megiddo, and Tel Yarmuth. A series of integrated studies based on the town site sequences focuses on the adaptive agricultural practices of the Early Bronze Age people, revealed through the paleobotanical evidence, pollen analysis, and the ground stone industry. Specialized studies on the chert tools, metals, jewelry, and glyptic art offer new insights into the cultural patterns that distinguish this period. A new series of C14 dates helps to situate the Jordanian material within the contemporary cultural sequences of the fourth and third millennia in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

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.

The scarcity of water is a major problem in many parts of the Near East today and has been so in the past. To survive in such a region people should be able to structurally attain more water than rainfall alone can supply. The archaeology of this area should not only identify when people inhabited such a region and what the character of this habitation was, but also how people were able to survive in such a region and why they chose to live there in the first place. In this book these questions have been studied for the Zerqa Triangle; a region in the middle Jordan Valley around Tell Deir 'Alla (Jordan). By means of a detailed pedestrian archaeological survey the intensity of habitation of the region from the Neolithic to early modern periods is investigated. Efforts have been undertaken to reconstruct the agricultural practices in the various periods and simultaneously the means by which the different communities were able to practice agriculture; in other words, how did they irrigate the land? By focussing on the different social responses of communities, conclusions have been drawn on how and why people managed to create a living in this arid, but potentially very fertile region. This book not only contributes to the ongoing discussion of the archaeology of marginal areas, but also provides a huge amount of new data on the archaeology of the Jordan Valley, both in the form of newly discovered settlement sites from several different periods as well as remains from several more inconspicuous types of human activity present in the countryside.

Jordan is a key area of migration within the Levantine corridor that links the continents of Africa and Asia. 'Crossing Jordan' examines the peoples and cultures that have travelled across Jordan from antiquity to the present. The book offers a critical analysis of recent discoveries and archaeological models in Jordan and highlights the significant contribution of North American archaeologists to the field. Leading archaeologists explore the theory and methodology of archaeology in Jordan in essays which range across prehistory, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Nabatean civilization, the Byzantine period, and Islamic civilization. The volume provides an up-to-date guide to the archaeological heritage of Jordan, being an important resource for scholars and students of Jordan's history, as well as citizens, non-governmental organizations and tourists.

This volume presents a range of petrographic case studies as applied to archaeological problems, primarily in the field of pottery analysis, i.e. ceramic petrography.

Burton MacDonald presents an in-depth study of the archaeology and history of human presence over the past five-six thousand years in the southern segment of the Transjordan/Edomite Plateau and the Dead Sea Rift Valley to the west. The evidence from archaeology for the area spans the entire period though the time for which literary evidence is available is only the past 4000 years, from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1550 BC). Once literary evidence is available, however, it complements the archaeological record and, as can be amply demonstrated, the written records can be clarified only through the archaeological data. These two sources are, thus, used to describe environments, resources, industries, settlement patterns, and the lifestyles of the inhabitants of this pivotal region. The result is a “story” of the people who lived in the area from the Bronze Age through the Islamic period. What is evident is that there were differences in certain archaeological periods in settlement patterns, as well as lifestyles, between those who lived on the southern segment of the Plateau and those who lived in the Dead Sea Rift Valley or in the lowlands immediately to the west. Moreover, it is obvious that when there were periods of trade and industry, for example, the spice trade and copper mining and processing, the population of the area was higher. Stable governance brought about growth in population and prosperity. But other factors also played their part in these ebbs and flows of population: climatic fluctuations affecting the availability of water and arable land; the development and adoption of new technologies in farming practices, raw material extraction and industrial methods, processes and transportation; and political change resulting in periods of relative stability and instability in government.

The mystery surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls remains, over 60 years after their rediscovery. Who hid them and why? This groundbreaking book reinvigorates the contested hypothesis that the Essenes were responsible. Rather than being a marginal esoteric sect, Taylor shows that this group acted as one of the leading legal schools of Judaism.