Do shifts in material culture instigate administrative change, or is it the shifting political winds that affect material culture? This is the central question that Shlomit Bechar addresses in this book, taking the transition from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (seventeenth-fourteenth centuries BCE) in northern Canaan as a test case. Combining archaeological and historical analysis, Bechar identifies the most significant changes evident in architectural and ceramic remains from this period and then explores how and why contemporary political shifts may have influenced, or been influenced by, these developments. Bechar persuasively argues that the Egyptian conquest of the southern Levant-enabled by local economic decline following the expulsion of the Hyksos and the fall of northern Syrian cities-was the impetus for these changes in ceramics and architecture. Using a macro-typological approach to examine the ceramic assemblages, she also discusses the impact of the influx of Aegean imports, suggesting that while "attached specialists" were primarily responsible for ceramic production in the Middle Bronze Age, Late Bronze Age ceramics were increasingly made by "independent specialists," another important result of the new administrative system created following Thutmose III's campaign. An important contribution to our understanding of the transition between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, this original and insightful book will appeal to specialists in the Bronze Age Levant, especially those interested in using ceramic assemblages to examine social and political change.
Shlomit Bechar is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Haifa Center for Mediterranean History at the University of Haifa. She is Codirector of the Tel Hazor excavations and is a coauthor of Hazor VII.
"Bechar has undertaken an in-depth study of the ceramics at Hazor and put its assemblage in dialogue with those of surrounding settlements, which will extremely useful for archaeologists working in the region. This study allows her to make important conclusions-such as the fact that pottery shapes at Tel Arqa in the LB II become less similar to those in the Southern Levant and more similar to those of the Northern Levant. In border zones where allegiances fluctuate, this kind of ceramic shift may represent one of the few available ways to understand political shifts at the time." -Ellen Morris, author of Ancient Egyptian Imperialism
