Dr. Steven Falconer and Dr. Patricia Fall from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, along with Dr. Suzanne Pilaar Birch (University of Georgia), Dr. Elizabeth Ridder (California State University San Marcos) and Mary Metzger (Vancouver Community College) will evaluate the role of environmental change in the dramatic abandonment of the earliest cities in the ancient Southern Levant (modern Israel, Palestine and Jordan). This research addresses basic social and environmental questions regarding the development of early agrarian civilizations, and the social and physical landscapes they engendered and in which modern societies continue to live. Interdisciplinary studies featuring collaboration between archaeologists, geographers and earth scientists are particularly well-suited to apply deep time perspectives to the role of long-term environmental change, and thereby assess competing explanations for early urban collapse, as exemplified in the Southern Levant and witnessed repeatedly elsewhere. Understanding possible trajectories and potential impacts of ancient environmental change holds major implications for understanding how and why the earliest urban civilizations rose and collapsed. Accordingly, this research illuminates the often-precarious relationships between agrarian societies, both ancient and modern, and their ecological settings. This project takes great pride in the training of young female scholars in archaeology and geography. Among the five principal collaborators on this project, four are women, including two early career female assistant professors, one of whom is of Hispanic descent. This project will continue to recruit students from underrepresented groups and provide opportunities that broaden their participation in science through multiple avenues.
In close collaboration with their research team, Drs. Falconer and Fall will evaluate several competing scenarios to explain the strikingly pervasive and lengthy abandonment of the earliest Levantine cities 2500-2000 BC, and their rapid and dramatic reemergence immediately thereafter. This study features a controlled comparative analysis of environmentally-sensitive evidence excavated from four strategically-selected Bronze Age communities along the Jordan Rift: two in the northern Jordan Valley, Jordan and two lying just east of the Dead Sea Basin. Each pair of excavated sites includes a village occupied during urban abandonment (2500-2000 BC) and a village inhabited during the rebirth of cities (2000-1600 BC). Fine-grained radiocarbon dating of carbonized seeds will provide high precision chronologies for these sites. Coordinated analyses of stable isotopes from crop seeds, and animal bones and teeth will be used to estimate ancient rainfall and temperatures through time. Changing profiles of cultivated crops and herded animals will portray shifting human responses to environmental change. The analytical results from our four sites will be compared to infer trends of environmental change, both chronologically and geographically. Resulting trajectories of environmental change between 2500 and 1600 BC will be used to assess competing hypotheses to explain Levantine urban collapse. In sum, this research will contribute to the growing discussion of environmental dynamics at the heart of ancient social change with timely pertinence for human responses to environmental change in the modern world.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
