Outside the Pale: Marginality and Liminality in the Bronze Age Near East. Introduction

Abstract

Abstract Studies of the Bronze Age in the ancient world traditionally have focused on mainstream populations, together with their social organization, and the economic subsistence strategies implemented by them. As a result, those people who lived on the edges of society, whether defined geographically, socially, demographically, or economically, have received correspondingly less attention. Yet, peoples on the margins of mainstream populations fulfilled roles integral to the primary economic and social systems in Bronze Age cultures in the ancient Near Eastern and North African world. This concept of marginal and/or liminal groups in the ancient world, the importance of examining them, and different methods of addressing them, are presented here, as the introduction to the collected papers on marginality and liminality in the Bronze Age world of the ancient Near East and North Africa in this special issue of the Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History.