Levantine Archaeology

Levantine archaeology investigates the societies that lived along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea between the Amanus Mountains of Turkey and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The Levant’s geographic scope has shifted over the centuries in the minds of European audiences. Today’s definition includes all or parts of the modern nation-states that make up the Arabic toponym bilad al-sham, the “land of Damascus”: southeast Turkey, western Syria, Lebanon, the State of Israel and Palestine, and western Jordan. Scholars often make an artificial division between the Northern Levant (Syria, Turkey, Lebanon) and the Southern Levant (Israel, Jordan, Palestine) to narrow the geographic scope. The field of Levantine archaeology sits at the interstice of Middle (or Near) Eastern archaeology and Mediterranean archaeology. The earliest human ancestors entered the Levant 1.5 million years ago and have continuously occupied the region up to today, making the region one of the world’s oldest and continuously occupied locations on Earth. The Levant’s prehistoric Neolithic and Chalcolithic–era communities adopted sedentary lifestyles, a food economy largely based on domesticated plants and animals, and sparked new craft technologies based on stone, ceramic, and metal materials. The third through first millennia bce, the Bronze and Iron Ages, saw the establishment of territorial polities, the advancement of bronze and iron technologies, long-distance international trade, and the creation of the first administrative and literary written records in the region. Levantine societies fell under the sway of first Greek Hellenism, and later Roman imperialism and Byzantine Christianity between the fourth century bce and the sixth century ce. The seventh century ce saw the arrival of Islam in the Levant, followed by the successive wave of Islamic dynasties—the Umayyad, Abbasid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and Ottoman Empires—save an uneven two-century interlude of control by the European Crusaders. Levantine archaeology ends with the Ottoman Empire’s collapse following World War I, although this time horizon will likely extend deeper into the twentieth century as the field evolves. Due to this chronological depth in human occupation, the Levant offers a productive venue for examining the origins and development of agriculture, animal husbandry, craft production, religious and political organization, mortuary practices, hydrology, and maritime and terrestrial economies, all topics that will be explored in this bibliography. The discipline’s scholarship has appeared and continues to appear in multiple European (e.g., French, German, Italian, and Spanish) and Middle Eastern languages (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish). Scholarship written in English is prioritized in this bibliography for the sake of consistency.