2016-10-05 Andrea Creel - Connectivity on the Edge of Empire
Channel: Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley
Date: 2019-11-08

Connectivity on the Edge of Empire: Movement, Liminality, and Ritual in the Southern Levantine Drylands, Andrea Creel (Near Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley)
Oct 5, 2016 ARF Brownbag
To the untrained eye, the Sinai, Negev, and southern Jordan may appear stark and empty, a vast, lifeless, unchanging horizon on the edge of nowhere. Indeed, communities in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean often perceived these lands and their inhabitants as peripheral and marginal, if not dangerous and barbaric. However, thousands of years of archaeological remains, often still visible today, attest to quite another picture. This is a sedimented landscape, a palimpsest, where multiple communities inscribed themselves over the millennia. Many of these communities subsisted on a flexible patchwork of pastoralism, foraging and limited agriculture, trade, and mining, framed within the punctuated and cyclical movements of pilgrimage. In so doing, these communities actively drew on the visible past and movement through an arid landscape to constitute and cultivate their identities and an entangled connectivity with neighboring regions. In the Iron Age II (1000-600 BCE), the rise of the Assyrian Empire both facilitated and constrained this connectivity. The Assyrians bounded and funneled the flows of people and materials through this region in ways that foreshadowed the later empires of Rome, the Early Islamic Caliphates, and the Ottomans. However, local communities drew on the ancient meshworks of pilgrimage and the visible past to generate and foster new senses of self and ways of seeing in the midst of empire.
This talk analyzes the interaction of ritual, movement, and empire in the Iron Age as the confluence of multiple and overlapping senses of liminality unique to these lands. I suggest that both local and outsider communities (albeit in different ways) perceived these lands in terms of the potency of ambiguity and transitions. In the drylands, this potency manifested as a distinct and complex interplay between movement and mobility, aridity, marginality, and ‘betweenness.’ I utilize evidence of roadside ritual at Ḥorvat Qitmit in the Negev and Kuntillet ʾAjrûd in the Sinai as particularly pertinent case studies in understanding the complexities of ritual and multiple, overlapping liminalities in the drylands in the shadow of empire.