Rethinking the Social Complexity of Early Iron Age Nomads

Abstract

Recent evidence from the Aravah Valley challenges the prevailing assumption that Bedouin ethnography and inferences from ancient Near Eastern archives can adequately compensate for the archaeological lacuna in the study of biblical-era nomads. The evidence indicates that nomadic social organization at the turn of the 1st millennium BCE could have been – and in at least one case was – far more complex than ever considered before. This paper discusses the implications of the now extended spectrum of possible interpretations of nomads to the archaeological discourse on early Iron Age state formation processes in the Southern Levant.