Matthew Susnow

This article investigates how ritual transforms the ordinary into something extraordinary. It is the capacity of ritual to differentiate, and to be differentiated from other activities, that provides a group with a framework for seeing what they are doing as being meaningfully different than ordinary. Without the proper focusing lensritualization-special nonordinary acts and objects can look very mundane indeed. Furthermore, there is often a stark contrast between what ritual actually does, and what is claimed is being done. This study analyzes a first millennium BCE ritual from Mesopotamia-attested both archaeologically and textually-that deals with preparing and manufacturing various materials and paraphernalia necessary for laying a temple's foundations, to underscore (1) the fundamental utility of these notions in broadly studying ritual, (2) the processes and mechanisms that transform ordinary materials into special, perhaps "sacred," products, and (3) how ritual merges the gap between the real and ideal.

This study investigates the effects that an encounter with a foreign object can have on local traditions. Notions of object agency and object biographies will be utilized to address what happens when people become entangled with new things: the new context can have an impact on the newly introduced object, and those newly introduced objects can similarly impact locals and their traditions. The Late Bronze Age southern Levantine site of Tel Burna will serve as a case study, where a number of imported Cypriot pithoi were found alongside locally produced pithoi. It will be demonstrated that in their new context, the Cypriot pithoi were given new meaning and function. At the same time, the imported pithoi played active roles in the local potters of Tel Burna making pithoi. However, the local pithoi resemble local storage jars, so while the potters mimicked the concept of the Cypriot pithoi, they did so according to local normative forms.

This chapter presents the ceramic assemblage from Tomb 8050 in Area L at Kabri, excavated in 2019. The tomb comprised 37 vessels in total,  almost all complete, and included bowls, jugs, juglets and storage jars. The material dates to the MB II, most closely resembling the pottery of Phases IV and III of the palace and resembling assemblages from a number of burials previously excavated by Kempinski’s excavations, especially the pottery from Tomb 498.

During the 2017 and 2019 excavation seasons, a courtyard was exposed immediately to the west of the Kabri palace’s storage complex in Area DW-West. This chapter deals with the courtyard pottery and related contexts, presenting the typological and chronological analysis of various assemblages excavated in the courtyard. The study reveals that the pottery predates the final Phase III of the storage facilities, and thus the courtyard and related installations are earlier than the final MB phase of the palace. The courtyard is mainly contemporary with Phases V and IV of the palace, with some earlier material from Phase VI, and can best be defined as a massive accumulation of pottery that formed over time, beginning in the MB I and continuing into the MB II.

During the 2013–2019 seasons at Kabri, a storage room complex composed mainly of large pithoi was exposed to the west of the palace’s Orthostat Building. To date, at least 159 pithoi have been identified, although the entire complex has not yet been excavated. This chapter is an in-depth analysis of all of the Kabri pithoi from each storage room, focusing on rim typology and vessel metrics, including rim and neck diameters, vessel heights, and carrying capacities. The pithoi are overwhelmingly homogenous, with a high degree of standardization in terms of size, morphology and rim type. The average pithos had a rolled or elongated folded rim (Type I), stood ca. 1 m tall, and had a carrying capacity of ca. 100 liters.

This article addresses the relationship between metalworking and cultic space in the Bronze Age Southern Levant, tracing the earliest evidence of metallurgical activities within Southern Levantine temples to the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. This coincides with the appearance of a series of new cultic traditions in the region, including the large-scale dedication of votive offerings in temple settings. It is demonstrated that the local production within cultic venues was not intended primarily for the production of objects to be circulated outside the temple but mainly for the manufacture of goods to be used and offered during ritual activities conducted in the cultic spaces themselves.

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This paper addresses a major methodological issue faced by archaeologists when seeking to apply clear definitions to architectural units. Temples and palaces dominate the Bronze Age landscape of the southern Levant. But what are the parameters for distinguishing between these two types of spaces? Architectural analysis on its own can lead to misguided conclusions. A structure must be further contextualized on the local and regional levels, and the use of its interior space must be understood. This paper focuses specifically on the classification of Hazor's Building 7050, a monumental Late Bronze Age building that sits atop the site's acropolis. A detailed study of Building 7050's architecture, space syntax, activity types, metrology, and the site's urban planning demonstrates that the complex was modeled on cultic, not palatial, space.

Find the full article at https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/719821

Ritual cannot be studied in a vacuum. It is a process that differentiates and gains meaning in its role within its broader social system. This article addresses a major methodological issue in the archaeology of ritual, that there is no consensus on how to interpret ritual in past cultures. This study develops a methodology for identifying ritual in the archaeological record, one that is broadly applicable to archaeological contexts in different regions and combines theoretical approaches to ritualization with methods from household archaeology. To understand ritual’s function within a social system, it must be contextualized against the entire repertoire of a group’s activities. Thus, spatial analyses of all finds throughout different spaces must be conducted in order to reconstruct the range of past human behaviors in different types of spaces. This approach creates a well-founded platform for investigating use variability among ritual and nonritual spaces, and how ritual differentiates itself from other actions. As a case study, this methodology is applied to the Middle and Late Bronze Age southern Levant. The findings shed new light on our understanding of religion in the region, including the primacy of large-scale consumption in public ritual contexts. Contrasting contemporary houses and palaces, little on-site storage and food preparation is detected in ritual settings. The social, anthropological, and religious implications of the divergences identified between ritual and nonritual action and contexts are far-reaching, including the discovery of a hitherto undetected religious ethos and bringing into question whether southern Levantine temples were considered houses of gods.

This study explores how Hazor's elites used religion as an ideological tool to promote their legitimacy, to reinforce social hierarchy, and to maintain control over the populace. Hazor's elites made use of highly recognizable forms of cultic space so as to engage the non-elite sectors of society while altering the manner in which those spaces were used and who had access to them. This religious innovation at Hazor was directly related to an elite ideology that strived to maintain control over non-elites, while also aiming to integrate the various socially stratified groups into a community joined together in a sacred landscape.

This article investigates a connection between hoards of astragali (ankle bones) and the ritual use of these bones in the practice of extispicy. A number of sites in the southern Levant during the Iron IIA (10th–9th centuries BC) have yielded very large deposits of astragali, often from cultic contexts. The two prevailing theories explaining the function of astragali relate to games and divination, based on classical textual sources. However, the classical Greek sources are later and from a different region than the archaeological evidence investigated in
this article. This study therefore explores this phenomenon against the backdrop of texts from the ancient Near East. Following a discussion of astragali in the archaeological record, and the use of astragali as dice in a game known from the ancient Near East, a translation of an Old Babylonian tablet that features four omens (YOS 10 47 § 65–68), directly connecting the inspection of an animal’s astragali to the performance of extispicy, is presented. This connection between divinatory practices and astragali is now made explicit and can be utilized to offer new insights into the interpretation of astragali recovered from the archaeological record.

The existence of temples within urban, rural, and extramural settings in the Middle and Late Bronze Age southern Levant is well documented. However, defining what qualifies these spaces as "cul-tic" is significantly less clear. Accordingly, in this paper I utilize access analysis to define sacred space as a unique category of spatial configuration within the region, one that contrasts with other types of public and domestic spaces. As such, the trajectory and evolution of Canaanite temples and cultic architecture diverge in a number of ways from other types of spaces. I demonstrate this visually by supplying justified gamma maps for cultic and non-cultic architecture, underscoring the contrasting nature between the access to, movement through, and control of Canaanite temples and that of their domestic and palatial counterparts. The implications of this are remarkable. What emerges from this study is that Canaanite temples were unique not only in terms of the role they played within their surrounding landscapes and region, but also in how they were differentiated from temples and temple institutions of the surrounding ancient Near East, with relation to the rise of urbanization, social complexity, and elite control of religious institutions.

This article investigates the applicability of the concept of liminality to the archaeological analysis of temple thresholds, with a primary focus on the Bronze Age southern Levant. Previously, studies on cultic spaces have emphasized temple cellae as the central focal point of ritual. In contrast, ritual performed at temple thresholds has largely been an ignored phenomenon. This study presents theoretical, textual, and archaeological data to support the argument that thresholds, in general, elicited ritual activity, and that within temple contexts, a wide range of rituals were conducted, and offerings presented. After investigating the topic of liminality in rites of passage, an array of ANE texts will be used to shed light on threshold rituals. This is followed by a presentation of archaeological studies that have attempted to apply the concept of liminality to the archaeological record. Bronze Age temples from two sites, Lachish and Hazor, will be used as case studies to investigate whether there is evidence from the southern Levant for ritual in entrances and thresholds. The results of this study demonstrate that temple thresholds in Canaan did in fact function as liminal spaces within which ritual was conducted. Additionally, this study identifies an important distinction between rituals that were performed in the liminal space of thresholds and those that were performed in the temple's cella. Ritual in the cella was theocentric, with the primary focus on the deity, while ritual at thresholds was anthropocentric, concerned with humans and their status transformations.

This paper assesses whether the assumption that temples functioned as houses of the deity is appropriate for southern Levantine cultic spaces of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages. While this notion is based on textual traditions, very few texts have been recovered from the Bronze Age southern Levant, with no extant references to temples. In order to investigate this issue, temples will be analyzed in terms of architecture types, space syntax, and the repertoire of activities performed within them. In contrast to previous text-based studies of religion and temples in the southern Levant, this study relies solely on the archaeological data on the ground. In shifting the focus from non-indigenous textual claims to the more local artifactual data recovered in excavations, it is demonstrated that temples diverge significantly from contemporary domestic spaces in terms of architecture, space syntax, and function. This observation is all the more so compelling when compared to other regions of the ancient Near East, where the distinctions, while apparent, are much more blurred and temples were structured based on the model of the house, linguistically, architecturally , spatially and functionally.

This paper explores the different types of cultic spaces that appear in the southern Levant during the Middle Bronze Age. The site of Megiddo provides a perfect case study for investigating the diversity attested within local Canaanite cultic architectural traditions, diachronic changes in temple types and forms, and the relationships between temples, their surrounding settlements and landscapes, and society at large.

Provenience, dating, measurements (mm), and catalogue numbers for the skeletal elements used in the LSI analysis, as demonstrated in Harding, S. et al. Hoofprints in the Sand: A Metric Study of Livestock on the Southern Phoenician Coast. In preparation for <em>Quaternary International</em>.

This study explores the nature of Canaanite cult in the Middle Bronze Age (MB). To date, most scholarship focusing on this subject has done so against the backdrop of the ancient Near East. Thus, essential aspects of cult in the ANE were assumed to be of similar significance in Canaan. Monumental temple architecture and cultic figurines, for example, were presumed to be the central indicators of cultic activity in Canaan. However, none of these previous studies took into account the uniqueness of the local Canaanite landscape and the impact the landscape had on the development of culture and religion in the region.
The research conducted in this thesis therefore approaches Canaanite cult from a Mediterranean perspective, understanding the southern Levant as an eastern Mediterranean micro-region (per the definition of Horden and Purcell in The Corrupting Sea) of highly variegated landscapes within a compact and small area. As such, the southern Levant was intricately connected to the maritime trade networks that prospered during the MB. The Mediterranean was an outlet for connectivity to other regions – for trade and inevitably for the transmission of ideas and traditions. Thus, the Levant differed from the core areas of the ANE as Syro-Mesopotamia and Egypt.
The methodology followed was straightforward: a comparison of coastal to inland sites. Chapter one surveyed the state of research of MB cult practiced in Canaan. In chapter two, aspects of Canaanite cult at coastal sites were analyzed. In chapter three, the major features of cult at inland sites were analyzed. Chapter four synthesized the findings from the previous chapters, gleaning insights on aspects of similarity and difference between inland and coastal areas.
A number of observations and conclusions were found. For example, coastal sites tended to be open air in nature, featuring maṣṣebot, miniature vessels, metal figurines, stone anchors, and ship and shrine models. On the other hand, inland sites in Canaan often featured large migdal temples and lacked many of the cultic objects of coastal sites, including large concentrations of female figurines, miniature vessels, and stone anchors. Certain objects, such as maṣṣebot, were found throughout, being central
VII
components of cult in MB Canaan and a continuation of an Intermediate Bronze Age tradition.
Moreover, the eastern Mediterranean perspective allowed for a more focused and localized discussion of cultic traditions that prior studies tended to ignore. For example, instead of assuming migdal temples were a feature characteristic of MB Canaanite cult, it was demonstrated that they were only late MB imports from Syria. It would seem that this study and the methodology employed in it should serve as a basis for further studies on the topic of Canaanite cult.