Drs. Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish will combine field and laboratory research in Israel and the United States to study the changes in animal utilization between ca. 1500 and 600 BC. A series of five stratified urban sites - Ashkelon, Tel Batash, Tell Jemmeh, Tel Miqne, and Tel Qasile - all located in southern Canaan span this time interval, and careful excavations are providing large well provenienced faunal samples. The investigators will identify remains to a species level, determine the minimum numbers of individuals represented, and the ages at which animals were slaughtered. Through radiographic analysis of bone, they hope to determine whether animals such as cattle were used for draft or consumption and, in the latter case, whether they were raised primarily for meat or milk. Finally, examination of differential representation of individual skeletal elements and breakage patterns of each will permit reconstruction of butchering practices. This analysis will provide important insights into how complex economic systems developed in the Old World and how these were influenced by political change. Animals were an important component of the economies of the ancient world, and as political fortunes shifted between periods of disaggregation and centralization, so too did the social institutions that managed production and consumption switch between independence and integration. Superimposed on the environmental framework within which herdsmen made their decisions, socio-political forces acted to influence the choices made by individual animal husbanders and households. In the ancient eastern Mediterranean, four supra- household institutions had an impact on animal production and use: the market, the ritual center, the taxation/tribute system, and the relations between the agricultural and pastoral sectors of society. All four of these have been identified in ethnographic and historical models of culture change and linked with faunally measurable variables. During the period under study (1500 to 600 BC), this region underwent several major well documented political changes, and the study by Drs. Hesse and Wapnish should reveal the economic effects of these. This research is important for several reasons. First, it will increase our understanding of how complex societies, such as our own, are developed and maintained. Secondly, the models of economic organization which emerge will provide direct insight into how more traditional Middle Eastern economies function at the present time.
