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Rethinking the Social Complexity of Early Iron Age Nomads

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. Using the case of ancient Edom and Moab, the paper demonstrates that common reconstructions of “emergence” and “collapse” are, in fact, oscillations in the archaeological visibility of nomadic societies, which do not necessarily correlate to an increase or decline in social complexity. Rather, it is more likely that the appearance and disappearance of stone-built remains reflect processes along the sedentary–nomadic continuum (in which “sedentary” does not equal more socially complex), as well as a response to varying economic and geopolitical needs. It is likewise argued that in current biblical archaeology, archaeology-based historical reconstructions of ancient Israel and the United Monarchy are inherently flawed and suffer from a bias in favor of interpretations of the more “critical” school, as it gives an unbalanced weight to the sedentary (i.e., the archaeologically visible).