Houses and Their Furnishings in Bronze Age Palestine: Domestic Activity Areas and Artefact Distribution in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages.

• Author: Dever, William G.

This volume was first submitted as a doctoral dissertation to the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Professor John S. Holladay, Jr. Like many dissertations, it is an extension of a good advisor's seminal idea, exhaustively researched, and often inconclusive. In this case, the weakness is not so much that of Daviau, who has done her homework well, as it is of the basic data of Palestinian archaeology, much of which was excavated long ago with poor methods and is too badly published to yield the information that would be required to fulfill the promise of this work's title. In the older literature there are simply too few Middle or Late Bronze Age houses that have been found well preserved, with their contents reasonably intact, and were recorded and published fully. The irony is that more modern interdisciplinary excavations in Israel and Jordan, which are as methodologically sophisticated as any anywhere in the Middle East (or, for that matter, the Old World), have employed more meticulous techniques and thus concentrated necessarily on smaller exposures - and thus have isolated living surfaces but have brought to light very few domestic structures in their entirety.

Daviau is well aware of larger processual issues in archaeology. Here, however, she deliberately focuses simply on identifying "individual activity areas," depending then upon spatial distribution and functional analysis of artifact assemblages to illuminate "material correlates of specific behaviour patterns" (p. 26). In the introduction (pp. 17-23) and in the initial chapter on theory and method (pp. 25-33), she surveys the scant previous literature, mostly treatments of architecture per se. In addition, she discusses the nature of the archaeological record - obviously a critical question here - and also treats functional arguments based on ethnographic analogies. Chapter 2 (pp. 34-68) deals with model-building, combining the well known studies of P. J. Watson and C. Kramer to produce what Daviau calls "Ethonographic Activity Sets" (table 2.1), a detailed list of several dozen possible installations or artifacts that the archaeologist might encounter, together with the activities that they should imply. A second set of tables (2.2-2.8) develops an elaborate computerized code for distinguishing the foregoing items. Other tables (2.9-2.11) encode architectural, ceramic, and other features. These attempts to systematize...