Joe D. Seger - Böcker

In 1912, R. A. S. Macalister published reports on his PEF excavations at Tell Gezer in central Israel, including notice of having traced more than 1,400 meters (almost a full mile) of defense walls around the site. Now, a century later, a detailed reassessment of these fortifications is provided in the publication of Gezer VII: The Middle Bronze and Later Fortifications in Fields II, IV, and VIII, edited by Joe D. Seger and James W. Hardin. This volume features work at Gezer sponsored by Hebrew Union College and Harvard University between 1968 and 1974, reporting on excavations at Macalister’s “Southern Gate” (Field IV) and along his “Inner” and “Outer” wall systems both on the southern (Field II) and northern (Field VIII) flanks of the site. These excavations produced much new data, enabling a confident dating of the Southern Gate complex and the Inner Wall system to the latter part of the Middle Bronze period (1700–1500 B.C.E.) and of the Outer Wall to the Late Bronze II and subsequent Hellenistic eras. Among a rich array of cultural remains, intramural occupation of the Middle Bronze Age yielded a gold jewelry hoard and early evidence of alphabetic writing.

This is the sixth volume in the series of reports on investigations by the Lahav Research Project (LRP) at Tell Halif in Southern Israel. This work focuses on the Project’s efforts in Field I conducted during eight excavation seasons between 1976 and 1999. Field I was opened down the northeast slope of the tell in order to assess the long-term history of occupation at the mound site. Its excavation work documented the presence of fifteen primary occupation strata, including 46 sub-phases, stretching from the Early Bronze III period in the mid-third millennium B.C.E. to modern times. The major exposures include four strata of EB III remains (Strata XV to XII), and another five of LB to early Iron I materials (Strata XI to VII). Traces of Iron II (Stratum V)I and Persian (Stratum V) remains were found in one area at the crest of the mound, where levels were otherwise disturbed by a modern army trench and Bedouin graves (Stratum I). A few modest remains of Late Roman/Byzantine (Stratum III) and Islamic (Stratum II) eras were identified in downslope areas.These excavations revealed that, following a robust occupation on the site’s Eastern Terrace in the EB I period, it lay fallow in EB II, settlement only to recover on the hillock to the west as a major fortified enclave in EB III. Then, after another gap in occupation during the EB IV and MB periods, it recovered again in the early LB I era, becoming an emporium associated with Egyptian trade, hence thriving, with continuity of occupation into the Iron Age and beyond.

This seventh volume of final reports of the Lahav Research Project’s efforts at Tell Halif in Southern Israel focuses on the team’s excavations and related regional ethnographic research at adjacent Khirbet Khuweilifeh, an early twentieth-century settlement of Bedouin and Arab fellahin clients. These efforts illustrate the symbiosis between the itinerant Bedouin and their seasonal sharecropper neighbors along the northern flanks of the Negev desert during and following the First World War in southern Palestine.The stratigraphic excavation and recovery of material culture from Cave Complex A revealed a pattern of occupation dating from the late nineteenth century C.E. up to the mid-1940s and produced hundreds of artifacts and samples, giving testimony to the lifeways of the fellahin who had inhabited the complex. The associated ethnographic research with Bedouin sheikhs and Hebron-area merchant informants established that the Complex’s most recent occupants were the family of a plow maker named Khalil al-Kaayke. The studies elucidated in this volume articulate in more detail the family’s patterns of subsistence, showing the interdependence of the Bedouin and fellahin partners. Examination of the pottery remains provides a profile of the site’s Stratum I, early twentieth-century ceramic forms and also reveals earlier Islamic-period and pre-Islamic traces.Over the past century the lifeways of these early twentieth-century Bedouin and their fellahin village neighbors in southern Palestine have been rapidly disappearing. This volume serves to chronicle and preserve data on their waning history and culture.