Nahal Tillah Project Aims


by Thomas E. Levy
Professor, Department of Anthropolgy and
Judaic Studies Program
University of California, San Diego
email: tlevy@weber.ucsd.edu

Core-Periphery Interaction and Social Change in the Negev Desert (ca. 4500-3500 BCE), Israel

This project will obtain new archaeological data from southern Israel to examine the role of early Egyptian civilization in the rise of urban communities in the less advanced southern Levant during the late 4th-3rd millennium BC (i.e., in Syro-Palestine; the area including Israel, Jordan, the disputed territories, and the Sinai peninsula). While the centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization were always in Egypt and Mesopotamia, Syro-Palestine and its location on the land-bridge between Africa and Southwest Asia, provides a unique opportunity for examining some of the processes which led to the rise of the earliest secondary states in this key periphery. Recent excavations in the Nahal Tillah region of Israelís northern Negev desert, by the UCSD teamt, have revealed a wealth of new late Protodynastic/Early Dynastic Egyptian archaeological (including some epigraphic data) which will enable scholars to re-examine issues associated with secondary state formation in this part of the ancient Near East.

The discovery in 1994 and 1995 of a wealth of late Predynastic/Early Dynastic Egyptian artifacts and architecture in Israel opens up a unique opportunity for analyzing the nature of early Egyptian contact with the southern Levant. In 1996, students participating in the UCSD Nahal Tillah Archaeological Field School will help excavate monumental Egyptian-style architecture found at the site and participate in the analysis of all the archaeological data discovered during the summer.

Early Pristine States vs. Secondary States
The southern Levant never witnessed ìpristineî state formation of the type and scale usually associated with centers of state formation such as central Mexico (Adams 1966), the Indus Valley (Kenoyer 1991; Possehl 1990), southern Mesopotamia (Adams 1981; Algaze 1993; Weiss and Young 1975; Zagarell 1986), and Egypt (Hoffman 1979; Hassan 1988; Wenke 1991). The degree to which Egyptian state formation was an endogenous process is controversial and scholars such as Bard (1994) and Kantor (1992) highlight the evidence for possible Mesopotamian influence (cf. Bard 1994; Kantor 1992). However, for our purposes, the proposed research focuses on the social evolutionary impact of core-periphery relationships which involved an early state colossus (Egypt; cf. Hassan 1988; Wenke 1991) and one of its peripheries (the southern Levant). Secondary state formation has been discussed for Syro-Palestine by scholars such as Esse (1989), Falconer (1987), Joffee (1993) and Levy (Levy et al 1995).

The issue of secondary state formation can most profitably be examined in the context of core-periphery interaction. From the 1960s through early 1980s, archaeologists have concentrated their studies of social change by studying the internal factors which promoted social reorganization. Some of these endogenous factors include changes in local exchange networks, technology, population structure, and subsistence economies. For the most part, the analysis of these issues was spurred on by an interest in the identification of social ìtypesî, especially chiefdoms and states, which evolved out of an assumed unilineal ìsocial evolutionary stepladder.î While studies which focus on the adaptive success of these formative social formations have been extremely useful for identifying local processes of change, they have tended to pigeon-hole social formations into one social evolutionary category or another without explaining how change occurs (Yoffee 1993). In the search for broad evolutionary models, these studies have failed to identify the rich diversity of social formations which make up the tapestry of ancient societies in world history. In terms of world archaeology, this problem is thrown into relief when social transformations occur along the interface between the prehistoric and historic periods. This is when asymmetric interactions between different socio-economic organizations become markedly clear in the archaeological record.

An essential framework for examining asymmetric social interaction is the study of center-periphery relations. Center-periphery studies are rooted in geographical studies of human spatial organization as early as von Thuenen (1826) and are commonly represented in the diffusionist and hyper-diffusionist studies of the early part of this century when all culture change throughout the world was thought to come from Egypt (Smith 1923) or the other centers of ancient Near Eastern civilization (Childe 1934). In the 1980s, archaeologists reconstituted center-periphery studies by concentrating on changes in power relationships between social formations of distinct unequal levels of organization (Cherry 1987; Renfrew and Cherry 1986; Champion 1989). The central issue in secondary state formation are the of dynamics of core-periphery relations and how core civilizations influence culture change in their less developed neighbors. This issue has been recently highlighted through the application and debate surrounding E. Wallersteinës (1974) world systems model which examines the economic asymmetries of these ties and is discussed below (cf. Algaze 1993; Chase-Dunn and Hall 1991; Frank 1993; Kohl 1987; Stein 1993). This has led to alternative models, based on the notion of distance-parity which assumes that the ìTyranny of Distanceî works toward symmetrical relations of power between center and periphery (cf. Bairoch 1988:11; Stein 1993).

Bibliographic References
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