Reviews

Based on Porter’s 2007 PhD dissertation entitled The Archaeology of Community in Iron I Central Jordan, this well-edited volume presents an extended and challenging study of the development of Early Iron Age sedentary settlements (communities) in the ancient Near East, and more particularly in west-central Jordan, a region characterized by considerable environmental and climatological uncertainty. The reader is provided with detailed and scientifically grounded reconstructions of how communities in this region functioned in the Early Iron Age. The book is divided into six chapters, each organized into several discrete sections and ending with a comprehensive overview. In the introductory first chapter, Porter focusses on the concept of ‘community’ from the perspective of an archaeologist who is chiefly occupied with explaining cultural phenomena in the past. He briefly discusses the variety of connotations of the term ‘community’ associated with different socio-historical periods, and its location in the Middle East. As the author observes, Complex Communities is not the first publication investigating pre-industrial communities from an archaeological point of view. What is exceptional here, however, is the fact that the book concentrates on communities living under challenging environmental conditions. In Chapter 2 (Communal Complexity on the Margins) Porter emphasizes that in the past resilient communities were able to survive in unpredictable and changing environments. Due to communal complexity, such societies operated as dynamic entities which managed to change their habits and living patterns to accommodate environmental alterations and to adapt to new circumstances. A variety of reasons suggest that communal complexity facilitated sedentary life in arid and semi-arid zone settlements, for instance at the settlement of Jawa. One reason emphasized by Porter is the fact that in harsh environmental conditions, agricultural outputs were not always of the same kind as in other contexts, which in its turn may have led to better and collectively organized production management within the communities. Chapter 3 focuses on the different levels of social complexity in periods prior and subsequent to the Early Iron Age in the Southern Levant. Investigations of social complexity in the region of west-central Jordan, where Early Iron Age settlements are abundant, provide a considerable amount of information which can, for instance, be very useful when comparing to data from contemporary societies in other Levantine regions (e.g. the Coastal Plain, the Highlands). Archaeological research in west-central Jordan has revealed several patterns, either agreeing or contrasting with data from other sites in the Levant, and especially in the Central Highlands. Porter also mentions the problematic issues of biblical evidence, and the disagreements that most scholars have with such historical reconstructions. Also discussed in this chapter is the fact that the history of society in west-central Jordan in the late 2nd Millennium BC is, in many aspects, dissimilar from neighbouring regions. This is not however of minor importance as some previous scholars have implied, particularly when comparing with sites located in the Shephelah, Galilee and along the Mediterranean coast. A low, but steady concentration of settlements is characteristic for the region in the Early Iron Age. Some settlements, among which are Khirbat alMudayna al-‘Aliya, Khirbat al-Mudayna alMu’arradja and al-Lahun, exhibit similarities in size and design, which may be considered as indications for a single-tier settlement hierarchy. Other sites, such as ‘Aro’er, Balu’a, Sahab and al-‘Umayri, have only been exposed to a limited degree, but are likely to be comparable with al-‘Aliya, al-Mu’arradja and al-Lahun. One minor remark which can be debated is related to the foundation of Iron Age Lahun. Based on preliminary unpublished reports by Homès-Fredericq (held by the Department of Antiquities, Jordan), Porter states (p. 66) that the site is one of the earliest Iron Age settlements in the region, founded in the 13th century BC or the Late Bronze/Early Iron Age transition. However, more recent studies of the ceramic material (Steiner and Jacobs 2008; Swinnen 2009) does not confirm this date and consequently the settlement can be assigned to the Early Iron Age I (that is, the end of the 12th