This project (MRECS) investigates the role of pastoral mobility in the subsistence economy that developed during the rise of urban societies in the Levant in the 5th-3rd millennia BCE. While we might suspect this to have been associated with increasingly complex animal management practices, hard evidence for how these practices were modified as socio-economic organisation and land use changed remains lacking. Different groups likely responded in different ways, so that animals consumed at larger sites may have been acquired via a range of mechanisms, including animals raised by the community itself, locally or further afield, or brought to the site through external relationships, which might include trade and exchange.
MRECS considers two regional case studies, the north Jordan Valley (Tell esh-Shuna and Pella, Jordan) and the upper Orontes Valley (Tell Nebi Mend, Syria), which demonstrate different trajectories of development during this period. In the Jordan Valley, the early 3rd millennium BCE is associated with the fluorescence of walled towns, followed by a decline in sedentary settlement during the late 3rd millennium BCE that is often attributed to an increasing focus on pastoralist activities. In contrast, by the mid-3rd millennium BCE, western Syria was part of a wide-ranging system of large, integrated supra-regional economies, as state-level political systems developed and urban settlement expanded into the arid Syrian steppe. It has been proposed that exploitation of economic opportunities provided by a new livestock-based economy lay at the heart of this transformation, representing a fundamental shift in socio-political networks and risk management strategies.
Although material culture and texts provide indications of these major socio-economic changes, this research provides the first reliable means of directly testing these hypotheses by using multi-element isotopic analysis of archaeological animal enamel to examine changes in animal management and herding strategies in the Levant during this period. Sequential intra-tooth analysis of enamel has been successfully used in a variety of regions for elucidating the organisation of animal movements and herding practices using carbon (δ13C), oxygen (δ18O) and strontium (87Sr/86Sr) isotopes.
MRECS thus aimed to examine geographical differences in the patterns and scale of animal movement as identified from isotopic analysis of their skeletal remains, along with their relationship to concomitant changes in socio-political organisation, in order to identify how early state-level societies organised animal management, and how animals were provisioned to early urban centres.
