Visual affordances and social interactions at Early Iron Age Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʽAliya, Jordan

Abstract

Social archaeology of the early Iron Age southern Levant has tended to work from the top-down, using abstract models of social organization, collective identity and subsistence economies to interpret archaeological remains. In this paper a bottom-up approach that uses the visual affordances of the built environment of Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʽAliya, an Iron Age IB site on Jordan’s eastern Karak Plateau is proposed. Four different methods of visibility analysis are proposed, including a bespoke hybrid approach developed by one of the authors (Wilson). Analyses suggests that the two largest houses at Khirbat al-Mudayna al-ʽAliya were exempt from the dense inter-visible monitoring afforded by the built environment of the site. Combined with other archaeological evidence, the analysis supports the inference that these two houses were occupied by households whose status differed from their fellow residents by degree, if not kind. It is argued that extending this sort of micro-political analysis to other sites would allow for the construction of more nuanced, bottom-up, narratives of social change in the early Iron Age southern Levant firmly grounded in the archaeological record.