The influence of water on Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age settlement patterns in the southern Levant

Abstract

ABSTRACT While the environment cannot be considered a ‘ deus ex machina ’ for any event in human history, it is becoming increasingly clear to prehistorians that the extraordinary developments in human social complexity documented in the archaeological record since the beginnings of sedentism in the Late Pleistocene occurred in concert with profound climatic and environmental changes. This chapter investigates settlement patterns in Jordan, Palestine and Israel during a key archaeological transition in the southern Levant, the Chalcolithic to the Early Bronze Age (EBA). We summarise regional settlement location in relation to potential forcing factors which themselves may be indicative of societal and climatic change, such as springs, wadis, routes and permanent sites. We make a geospatial analysis and calculate ‘cost distance’ values between these forcing factors and the settlement data. We then analyse how these cost distance values change over time in different altitudinal belts. We find that the cost distance patterns varied at different altitudes during the transition period. In some altitudinal belts in the EBI and EBA, springs appear to determine settlement location, showing the importance of climate, while in other altitudinal belts formalisation of settlements around the longer-standing sites and routes suggest that socio-political changes may have been more influential in the EBA. The value of this method and the implications of our results are then discussed in the light of existing and emerging research on the transition from the ‘prehistoric’ to the ‘historic’ period.