‘The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey’. Development and Significance of Agrarian Resources in Bronze and Iron Age Palestine

During the planned duration of the collaborative research centre project A05 pursues the goal of tracing the history of agriculture in ancient Palestine. The Bronze and Iron Age societies, constituting themselves by their handling of agriculturally relevant resources, will be presented as ResourceCultures. During the first phase of funding the focus was on farming and the interdisciplinary collaboration of achaeobotany and biblical archaeology. For the first time all available archaeobotanical results for Bronze and Iron Age were gathered and analysed within their archaeological contexts. In addition to several individual studies, the project created an ‘Atlas of Farming in Ancient Palestine’ as a publication of central importance. In close cooperation with all projects of Project Division A. Developments and project C02 specific characteristics of long-term developments in the use of resources could be established, as well as the basic patterns of their literary construction. Contributing to Project Division A. our results allowed fundamental insights into the dynamics of the interdependence of human intervention into nature and processes caused by natural and climatic conditions. In addition, the project analyzes agricultural metaphors in the Old Testament. As a result, the significance of resource related metaphors in oral and literary traditions which are essential for forming identities become evident. The diachronic analysis of agriculture in the Southern Levant, applying the conceptual understanding of resources developed by SFB 1070, opens up new perspectives for the understanding of the regional Bronze and Iron Age cultures, including ancient Israel. The resulting innovative approach, considering Israel and neighbouring social groups and their predecessors as ResourceCultures, proves to be historiographically appropriate and extremely productive. All the more so, since previous research has described the ancient history of Israel mainly as a history of events, concentrating on actors from ruling elites or on the history of theology. In contrast to this, agriculture is more central to the sociocultural and religious identities of Israel and its neighbours since the Southern Levant was always an area shaped by small-scale farming throughout its history. During its second phase a third discipline – zooarchaeology – will add its expertise to the project. Accordingly, three case studies will be conducted, continuing the collaboration between archaeology and archaeobotany, but now including analyses of the fauna as well. In addition to farming, animal husbandry as the second essential part of agriculture now will be a focus of the project. Thus the research category of ResourceComplexes, helping to understand interrelations of the distinct resources, gains a central importance in project A05. When concluding the second phase of funding the results will be published in an ‘Atlas of Agriculture in Ancient Palestine,’ continuing and completing the ‘Atlas of Farming’. In the long run the project’s structure is determined by a progression of research, starting with the analysis of arable land (1^st phase), leading to the understanding of ResourceComplexes (2^nd phase) and finally to a synthetic representation of the agriculture related ResourceCultures in Bronze and Iron Age Palestine.