Archaeology of Agro-Pastoralist Economies in Jordan

Kevin McGeough is an Associate Professor in the Geography Department at the University of Lethbridge. He was the series editor of ASOR's Archaeological Report Series for six years and is currently the series editor of the Annual. Jennifer Ramsay is an assistant professor at the College at Brockport, State University of New York, in Brockport, New York. Jennifer is an archaeobotanist that specializes in the Near East and her research involves examining the agricultural economies of ancient societies ranging in date from the Chalcolithic up until the Islamic period. Natalie Mueller is an archaeobotanical Ph.D. Candidate in the Anthropology Department at Washington University in St. Louis. Natalie is currently focused on studying ancient native North American seeds crops in the Midwest. Robin Brown is an independent scholar of Islamic archaeology of the Southern Levant with specialized experience in the material remains of the Middle Islamic castles in Jordan where she conducted several excavations. Kevin Rielly is a professional zooarchaeologist working since the mid-1990s for a commercial archaeology company in London, UK. He was previously employed as a freelance faunal specialist at a number of sites particularly dated to the Islamic period in Jordan. Alan Farahani is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. Alan is an archaeologist and paleoethnobotanist who has worked on several field and laboratory projects based in Jordan, as well as in Spain, Armenia, and the Philippines. Benjamin Porter is Director of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology and an Assistant Professor in the University of California, Berkeley's Near Eastern Studies Department. He is the author of Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan Hanna Huynh recently graduated from University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Anthropology. She spent the past year working as an archaeology intern at the Presidio of San Francisco investigating the Spanish-Colonial site of El Presidio de San Francisco. Bruce Routledge is Reader in Archaeology in the Dept. of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, University of Liverpool (UK). Bruce directed excavations at Kh. al-Mudayna al-'Aliya, Jordan between 1994-2004 and currently co-directs the Dhiban Excavation and Development Project also in Jordan.

• Ramsey and Mueller: Plant remains from Tall al'Umayri broadly provide direct evidence for patterns of local consumption and agricultural production from Bronze Age to Early Iron Age contexts. More specifically a cache of wild or two-rowed barley was recovered from a clearly stratified domestic context, which was likely stored for either malting or fodder. This kind of evidence is vital to aid in identifying other aspects (culture, economic exchange and natural environment) of the emerging complex societies that subsequently occupied the region. Brown and Rielly: Middle and Late Islamic faunal collections from Karak castle in Jordan are described and examined in detail and compared with other contemporary collections from southern Jordan with results indicating regional trends in animal consumption that are linked to culture, trade, and subsistence activities. Farahani et al.: This article demonstrates that the collection and analysis of carefully provenienced samples of archaeological plant remains from a variety of archaeological contexts at Kh. al-Mudayna al-'Aliya improves our understanding of how economically important crops were stored, distributed, and processed in early Iron Age Levantine settlements in Jordan. The article contributes to archaeological and paleoethnobotanical studies of agriculture, animal husbandry, and crop storage in southwest Asia more broadly.