Abstrakt wystąpienia: 

The Early Bronze IV period (2600-2000 BCE) in the southern Levant has traditionally been described as a rural interlude between the collapse of the region’s first proto-urban centres in the EB II-III and their rejuvenation as a network of city-states in the early MBA. During this period, populations are thought to have dispersed into village communities that practiced simple forms of agro-pastoral farming. These approaches have overlooked the significance of several small but well-defended “enclosure” sites. Such sites were new foundations on the well-drained slopes of the Jordan Rift Valley escarpment, in areas better suited to the cultivation of upland tree crops than the flood-prone Jordan Valley floor.

The Khirbet Ghozlan Excavation Project proposes a model of horticultural specialisation that interprets enclosure sites as processing centres for upland fruit crops such as olive, and suggests they were enclosed to defend caches of seasonally-produced cash-crop commodities such as oil. This model explores how high-value liquid products helped promote a complex rural economy that reconfigured aspects of earlier urban production within smaller-scale exploitation of niche environmental zones. Ultimately, such forms of economic resilience may have underlain the rejuvenation of urban systems in the early 2nd millennium BC. This paper presents the results of the 2017, 2019 and 2022 excavations at the 0.4 ha enclosure site of Khirbet Um al-Ghozlan near Kufr Abil in the Wadi Rayyan. It examines the archaeobotanical, architectural, ceramic and lithic evidence for interpreting the site as a specialised olive oil production and storage site.