What do animal remains tell us about biblical Abel Beth Maacah?
Today, Tel Hazor and Tel Abel Beth Maacah represent major archaeological sites offering many insights on the ancient history of Israel.
By ROSSELLA TERCATINJars found at Abel-Beth-Maacah.(photo credit: ROBERT MULLINS)
For many centuries in the second millennium BCE, the biblical city of Hazor represented a major regional power.Today, tels from Hazor and nearby Abel Beth Maacah represent major archaeological sites offering many insights on Israel’s ancient history. In a study in the August issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, researchers analyzed faunal remains from Abel Beth Maacah to understand more about the relationship between the two centers and their political and economic structure in the centuries that preceded their appearance in the Bible.“The region of the Hula Valley is very interesting in terms of the archaeology of the 2nd millennium BCE,” Nimrod Marom, of the department of Maritime Civilizations and the Leon Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies at the University of Haifa, told The Jerusalem Post. “It was one of the major arenas of political action and hosted some of the largest cities in Canaan. In the past, I studied the faunal remains from Tel Hazor and therefore looking into the ones at Tel Abel Beth Maacah that somehow continued its record into the Early Iron Age, seemed the natural thing to do.”The idea behind the research was to understand what was happening politically and sociologically in the site by analyzing what kind of animals the inhabitants were breeding and eating.“Today, the discipline of zooarchaeology, which studies animal remains, is often used to reconstruct not only diet but also political economy and the relations of production,” Marom pointed out.The researchers started from several hypotheses, related to what kind of natural resources and societal structure they knew to be required to breed sheep, goats or cattle. However, their findings presented many surprises.“We had several assumptions,” Marom said. “The main one that was not proven right was that we expected to identify a major turning point in the way people bred livestock in Abel Beth Maacah after the collapse of the large city of Hazor at the end of the Bronze Age – end of second millennium BCE – especially regarding livestock for wool, which was a main industry. Surprisingly however, we discovered that this turning point happened much earlier, at the end of the Middle Bronze Age.“The ruling elite of the Middle Bronze Age was controlling both the pastoral and agricultural segments of the population; this system collapsed,” he added.As for the next step of research, Marom said there are studies in progress to reconstruct the movement of animals from one place to another in the area to map the spatial extent where they were grazing, also to understand issues related to political economy, borders and societies.Further studies might also help to shed light on the cultural and political affiliation of the sites and their change over the course of the millennia, which remain largely a mystery.
