Life on the margins: the early Iron Age site of ʿAyun adh-Dhib, Jordan

Abstract

Recent archaeological research in western Jordan, and the (semi-)arid regions of the southern Levant more generally, have prompted wide-ranging inquiry regarding technologies, economic interconnections, settlement patterns and subsistence strategies during the 11th and 10th centuries BCE. For western Jordan in particular, recent proposals have focussed on questions related to the nature of socio-political organization, arguing for the presence of both sedentary and nomadic hierarchies that challenge existing interpretations of largely decentralized agropastoral subsistence-based communities. Central to these discussions are a series of small, fortified sites, originally identified as the ‘Mudayna’ sites of the Wadi al-Mujib region. Recent archaeological research north of the Wadi al-Mujib, however, has identified that this type of site is not geographically restricted, but part of a broader regional, yet decentralized, pattern of agropastoral subsistence communities. This article introduces the site of ʿAyun adh-Dhib, an additional site of this character north of the Wadi al-Mujib. Findings from an archaeological survey conducted in 2023 at ʿAyun adh-Dhib support the notion of an emerging regional pattern of social adaptive responses to living in specific ecological niches during a period of social and political transition in the early Iron Age.