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Episode 56: The industrial revolution of prehistoric Israel, with Tom Levy
01:07:41
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- [00:05]
A
Hi everybody. Welcome to a very exciting episode of Ask Believe Anything, a palette cleanser for the soul. I have a wonderful, sweet guy who happens to be one of the most important archaeologists working on this region currently in academia and has written a fun new book about his life, but he's also written 12 academic scholarly books and hundreds of articles. Tom Levy is here and I am going to ask him questions about the deep, deep ancient world because he himself revolutionized some of our understanding of how states were formed in this place in the Chalcolithic period, before the Iron Age, before the Bronze Age. And he is going to walk us through some of the fascinating deep knowledge that he helped produce about the deep, deep ancient world. We're talking pre Bible, so if that's interesting to you, join me. It's going to be great. Tom Levy is the Distinguished professor and holds the was the founding holder of he no longer has the chair. He is retired, but was the founding holder of the Norma Kershaw Chair in the Archaeology of Ancient Israel and Neighboring Lands at the University of California, San Diego. A member of the Department of Anthropology and the Judaic Studies Program, he leads the Cyber Archaeology Research Group at the Qualcomm Institute at the California center of Telecommunications and Information Technology. Technology. I'm going to be asking him what the heck cyber archaeology means, has published 12 books, several hundred scholarly articles, and is the author of a new graphic novel which I have here called the Boomer Archaeologist. Now I am too old to appreciate that Boomer is funny and tongue in cheek because I'm not Boomer. I'm the last Millennial year. You could still be a millennial, which means I'm Gen X. I don't know, but it a kind of graphic novel about his life and experience and it has been a fascinating life and it's been fun to read. It's available on Amazon. Before I get into the conversation with Tom about all this fascinating stuff, I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored and the sponsor gave us an amazing record of American Jewish history on top of everything else. The episode is sponsored by Renee Schwaber and Matthew Schwaber in memory of their late husband and father who passed away on April 30, 2020. I want to share with you a few words written by Matthew to memorialize his father. Jack schwaber, born in 1937, figured among the last children of the Lower east side Yiddish enclave that Irving Howe memorialized in his masterpiece the World of Our Fathers. But the little shtetl on Delancey street never evoked his affection or nostalgia quite so much as as the American heartland and the Rocky Mountains, where he spent a good part of his adolescence trying to put his infirm, asthma ridden childhood behind him. He fell in love with the American west, both the stark beauty of its pristine open spaces that stretched for miles unscathed by human development and its myth of romantic individualism that promised an escape from his hardscrabble past. He returned there often during the course of his life to savor the national parks, to wander the continental dividend. This vision of the American west also inspired his love for Eretz Yisrael, for the land of Israel. His mother and aunt had managed to emigrate to the US from Galician Poland during the 1920s because an American relative sponsored their entry. People who listen to this podcast will know that that means that they managed to get in after a lot of the quotas were already in place, but their remaining siblings had to flee to Mandatory Palestine in order to escape Hitler's death machine. Still, my father visited his uncle and cousins in Israel during the 1950s and spent time there working on a kibbutz, a period he remembered fondly for the rest of his days. My father was both an ardent Zionist and a stalwart American patriot. He regarded these two identities not only as compatible but as interconnected, interrelated. His love for America informed his love for Israel, and vice versa. Had he written an epitaph, it might have read the American Experiment and the Zionist ingathering the last best hopes of Amisrael. May his memory bless and inspire the heroic IDF soldiers who have guarded the gates of Zion since October 7, who have acquitted themselves with indefatigable bravery and mettle. They uphold the Zionist ideal and by doing so they honor my father's memory. Thank you so much to the Schwabers. As I told you, what a document of the American Jewish historical experience. Thank you for sharing it. Tom, how are you?
- [04:48]
B
I'm doing well. I'm very happy that the hostages, the last living hostages, are back in Israel. It's phenomenal. And I was in Israel on October 7, 2023, the day of the invasion, the Hamas invasion. And I've been back a few times to Israel during the war. And so here, I mean, it's just my wife and I, and we do belong to the synagogue Bethel, where you spoke recently. We're all elated, but we don't know what's going to. It's not over till it's really over.
- [05:31]
A
Before we go into sort of the ancient world. You started working In Jordan, you worked for 20 years excavating here in Israel down in the south and in the Aravah.
- [05:41]
B
And.
- [05:42]
A
And then you, in 1996, two years after the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, you are working as an archaeologist in Jordan in one of the most important sites for understanding copper production in that period. And you're the first out of the closet Jewish archaeologist. Out of the closet nowadays means something else. But you're the first out of the closet Jewish archaeologist. You worked in this region with Jews, with Arabs. Tell us about what does your career look like? What is that trajectory? And then we'll dive into the research itself.
- [06:15]
B
Well, I started doing archeology in Southern California when I was about 14 years old. And by the time I was 17, I made my first trip to Israel specifically to volunteer on an archaeology dig run by the great professor Nelson Glick. And I wrote him a letter, and this is 1971, and I got a letter back from one of his associates saying, we're very sorry to tell you, but Professor Glick recently passed away, but you're welcome to join the excavation at the famous biblical site of Tel Gezer. So I went to Israel, spent six weeks on the excavation there, became the assistant photographer of the project as a young kid, and then volunteered on a kibbutz for six months. And this is before organized student groups and so on had, you know, I had to find my way to be able to volunteer on these different programs.
- [07:29]
A
I already have so many questions. You are 14, starting archeology in California. Please tell us about that. By 17, you know, you're going to be part of an archaeological dig over in Israel. This would have been a dig in English. Did you have to learn Hebrew? Did you know Hebrew for some reason? How did that work out?
- [07:47]
B
It was run by the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, where Nelson Glick had basically established the college campus on King David Street. And the deal was the college could have that land for 25 years for a dollar a year. But after 25 years, they had to expand it and build it up as a proper college campus. And they employed Moshe Safdie to do the job. And if you visit today, it's spectacular. And later on in my career, I actually became the assistant director of the Nelson Glick School of Biblical Archeology, Jerusalem, when we had actually immigrated to Israel. But I got my start in archeology because my mother went back to college in Southern California, and my parents became friendly with one of their professors, Count Taylor, who was an African American anthropologist who specialized in the Middle East. And he and my father became the drinking buddies. And so Count would come to our house, tell his stories about working in West Africa. And I thought, wow, I want to become an anthropologist and do that. But as a kid, you can't do cultural anthropology. But in America, anthropology is made up of cultural anthropology, linguistics, biological anthropology and archeology. And so I went on to. I volunteered for a dig in Pacific Palisades with ucla. That was my first dig and I just got hooked on it. I found my calling and I never looked back. In fact, today the only thing I can do is archeology and milk cows, which I learned working on a kibbutz. That's it.
- [09:57]
A
Milking cows is not very impressive, I have to tell you.
- [10:01]
B
No, milking cows is important, but it's.
- [10:04]
A
Not an impressive skill. I think in archeology you might have a chance to really make it. So you're in Israel, you do this research for 20 years, which we're going to get into, which goes to fundamental questions. How societies come together into states, how inequality forms in the most primordial society. But then you, in 1996, take your research into copper metallurgy basically over into Jordan. And first, just the modern fact of that and your colleague, Dr. Najjar, and what is that experience? What is that like to be someone. You're Israeli by then you, you have Israeli citizenship, right?
- [10:44]
B
I do have Israeli citizenship. And of course I'm an American. I was born in Hollywood and so I'm like red, white and blue American, but very similar to the people sponsoring this session today that you introduced. Very proud American, very proud Jew. And when I. It was a heady time after the signing of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, and the way it came about is the director of the main American center of Archaeology in Jordan, Pierre Bakai. The center there is called acor. He came over with Hamar Amash, who's a well known Jordanian architect, and they wanted to establish joint tourism around the Dead Sea. And at the time I was digging at Kibbutz La Hav and I was eating lunch in the dining room in 1996, and one of my friends said, hey, Pierre Bakai from Jordan is here. Would you like to meet him? I said, sure. So I met Pierre, we had lunch and then I took him for a tour of my site at Tel Khalif, the Tel Khalif terrace. And after the tour he said, you should work in Jordan. And I said, well, I've never been to Jordan. I've never been to an Arab country. And he said I could speak Arabic because I worked with the Bedouin in Israel. And he said, no, no, if you come to Jordan and rent a jeep, I'll be your driver. I'll take you all over Jordan. And then after the week tour, you pick where you want to go. And we went all over. We made it to Faynan, which is about 50 km south of the Dead Sea. And this is the copper or resource zone of southern Jordan. In fact, it's the largest copper ore resource zone in the whole of the southern Levant. And I wanted to work there because when we did our excavations in the northern Negev Desert of Israel at chalcolithic. At the chalcolithic site of Shiqmin, when we did chemical analyses of the metals and the ores that we found at the site, the chemical fingerprint was actually phenon 150km away. And so this was going to open up an opportunity to see the whole system of extraction, trade, exchange, technology in a holistic way. Because at the time, this part of Jordan was. I mean, there had been some research done there in the lowlands of what we call Biblical Edom, but it was kind of a terra incognita.
- [14:24]
A
Scholars have argued of late in recent decades that even though the Bible tells us that King David fought the kingdom of Edom roughly in that southern Jordan area, scholars thought that maybe King David did not, in fact, fight Edom. And this has been an argument because the evidence from the area or the lack of evidence from the area suggests that rather than a proper state that could field an army against a King David army, it was a bunch of pastoral nomads herding their sheep and goats and whatnot through the desert between not quite oases, but riverbeds. And it was not a society at the time, 5,500 years ago, that could field an army. And so maybe King David himself also was not. Was scarcely a king of a kingdom, but was, in fact, more sort of a tribal chieftain in a almost entirely pastoral or agrarian society with tiny little towns or villages rather than anything more significant. And then you do this study of copper metallurgy from, you know, a thousand years before King David in southern Israel. And then you go to Jordan, to this site, to Fainan, and you discover thousands of kilograms of copper slag of the leftover materials, the leftover rocks from a copper smelting, and you convince your colleagues that there wasn't a dome capable of fielding an army. Can you walk us through that great discovery which is years of your research?
- [16:03]
B
Well, let's just put it out there, Khabib, that my life is in ruins. Okay? That's what it's all about. And the study of ruins, that is. And you painted a broad.
- [16:19]
A
That was such a dad joke. I really appreciate it.
- [16:23]
B
I'm glad you got it. Um, it's so, you know, the Chalcolithic is one story, and then the early Bronze Age is another story. And when we get to the Iron Age, that's when we get to the biblical stories. And my colleague Mohammed Najjar and I are, we're the same, exactly the same age. And when we started working, doing our actual excavations in 1997, we dealt with the chalcolithic and the period and then the Bronze Age. And by the time we hit 50, we decided now we're going into the Iron Age. The Iron age is roughly 1200 BCE to 586 BCE, from the time of the settlement of the tribes of Israel around 1200 into the land until the destruction of the first temple. And that's the juicy part of biblical archeology. And neither of us had a dog in this fight of biblical archaeology because both of us were actually trained in prehistory rather than historical archeology. But we learned just to describe the.
- [17:48]
A
Fight, just the fight being scholars debating how reliable is the biblical account, not the biblical account of prophets hearing God's voice, but the biblical account of the Kingdom of David and the kingdom of Solomon and the wars and things like that.
- [18:02]
B
Yeah, the United Kingdom. The big fight has really been between biblical historians and more literalist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and sort of postmodern approaches to the Hebrew Bible that believe that because it was probably consolidated around 400 BC, that nothing in the historical text before 400 BCE was historically valid. It was all myth. Okay? And that's what a lot of European scholars from the University of Copenhagen in Sheffield, those were the centers of this sort of postmodern approach to the Hebrew Bible. Well, along came my dear friend and colleague Yisrael Finkelstein, who became emblematic of the other, the low chronology of biblical scholarship, I.e. yisra' El, in many, many of his writings, including a book, had suggested that in the traditional 10th century BCE, when you have the united monarchy of David and Solomon, he said there were no. Based on his analyses of pottery and stratigraphy and so on, he redated everything. And he said in the 10th century BCE there were no complex societies like kingdoms in Israel or in any other of the neighboring so called kingdoms of that time. Okay. And that approach, the biblical minimalist scholars, they like that, and they thought, oh, Finkelstein is on our side and all of that. Well, actually, all he did was shift all the monumental building that had been ascribed to David and Solomon 100 years later to the 9th century BCE. And so for him, there's still a lot of history in the Hebrew Bible, but the winners of that story are the Omrid kings of Israel. Okay. That was sort of the situation. Muhammad and I started digging and I was developing, helping to develop the field of cyber archaeology, I.e. methods of recording data in a much more controlled 3D environment so that our observations could be repeated by other scholars dealing with the same data, the typical scientific method. So that was how we controlled space. But then we want to control time. How do we do that? Through high precision radiocarbon dating, not relying on pottery styles. I mean, we include that. But the main thing is to use objective, objective radiometric dating methods. So we use radio.
- [21:36]
A
Let me, I'm sorry, let me just give a little bit of background just as you move forward. My mother studied archaeology at Hebrew University, worked at Masada, worked at some other places. And so I, I heard this complaint all my childhood that you have to memorize infinite amounts of pottery. The shape, the, the color, the, the chemical composition, the way the spouts all come up, then all just literally because of where it sits on the, on the layering of an archaeological site. You can, you can date it. There's carbon dating. If there's a little bit of a remain of some material inside, organic material, oil or seeds or whatever, and you build out a picture, and then if you see that style of pot 100 km away, you know it was from the same period. You know, it may have been sourced in the original place where you found it in the first place. So that was the way you dated this stuff, was literally this. And students had to sit and learn for years how to identify all the different pottery. And so you, you turn to now. Carbon dating is not new. It's old. It's been around a long time. What is.
- [22:45]
B
It's been around since after the Second World War, when it was, when it was invented. And I have to say, it was very rare to apply radiocarbon dating up until the radiocarbon dating was used in prehistory and the archeology of Israel from its beginning. But it was rare to apply it to the historical archeological periods, the ones that you referenced. And that was why your mother had to study typologies of pottery in such depth. Israeli archeology was really very descriptive. It was a descriptive, descriptive field. And When I started becoming a professional and presenting at conferences in Israel, I was presenting an anthropological archaeology approach which looks at social evolution. And many Israeli professors at the time were very skeptical of me and my work. You know, they would say, Tom, Professor Ram Gophna from Tel Aviv University said, tom, you have to walk the land and you have to smell the flowers. You know, you can't bring these fancy theories from other parts of the world and try to apply it to our archeological record. And I said, ram, I just spent like three years walking through the deserts of the northern Negev. When I started working in Israel, it was very, very rare to apply an anthropological archeology approach which looks at comparative ethnographic studies of pre modern peoples like tribes and chiefdoms, you know, oh, currently living ones. Currently living ones from the, like from the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60th, that provide models of how these ancient societies probably were organized and so on. And so there was a lot of pushback on my work, like with the Chalcolithic period, because I used some models of Polynesian chiefdoms from Hawaii to understand the social structure of a chalcolithic cemetery that I excavated on the Nachal Beersheva. And that caused an uproar, you know, and a lot of debate and so.
- [25:39]
A
On today, wacky American showing up with his Polynesian period. Okay.
- [25:45]
B
And today, you know, Israeli archeology, it's totally changed and it's an unbelievably exciting time, time to interact with Israeli archaeologists because they've taken on a lot of anthropological approaches, social evolution and so on, but they also, they maintain these deep traditions of total control over the material culture and those typologies that your mom had to study and so on, still very important, but they're bringing it to a new level. And they've totally adopted the understanding of the importance of science based archaeology for their fields, for their departments and institutes throughout Israel. And so some of the most exciting research in science based archaeology today on the global scene, it's coming out of Israel, but they went through, you know, stages.
- [26:58]
A
And so, okay, so the copper mines, the copper metallurgy, archeology, maybe all science, I don't know, but archaeology, because there's so few signals from the deep past, archaeology has to do a lot with very little. And so you have an insight into how the diameter of the pipes used to pump air into the furnaces for the metallurgy of copper tells us there must have been a copper producing elite that controlled a society and an economy. The amount of slag tells us that there must have been. So walk us through that insight. Edom was not a bunch of nomads with sheep. Edom was a copper producing society with power and elites. And there was another point which was made in a lot of the material about your work, which was there's this sense that this area was this marginal backwater and big kingdoms established kingdom. The Assyrians, the Egyptians, they had to show up and they introduced almost state building to the area. And you say no, actually the locals figured out how to build what might be called today states and you know it from the copper. So how do you find from so few signals a societal structure or a society here that was much bigger than any other signal that we have?
- [28:32]
B
Okay, well, first of all, we're excavating sites with very precise stratigraphic methods, layer by layer and sieving everything, acquiring a really good picture of the material culture represented at whatever period site we're excavating. And now your question is about the Iron Age and how we identified these local kingdom as it were, in this neighboring area of biblical Israel. So I'll explain how we did it. But the significance is that we showed definitively that there was a complex society in the 10th century BCE in Jordan that produced copper on an industrial scale, showing that our friends like Yisrael Finkelstein were actually wrong in suggesting that there were no complex societies in the 10th century that would map on with the stories of David and Solomon. Okay, so now what we, so we go to Jordan and we have this amazing landscape of ancient copper production in Faynan. There are hundreds of sites spread over the landscape. And at the largest site, which is called Khibat an Nahas, which in Arabic means the ruins of copper, we have the whole site, 10 hectares, that's about 25 acres, is covered in black slag, the detritus of copper smelting, as you pointed out. So you have to mine the copper ore. And we identified, we built on the work of Professor Andreas Hauptman of the German Mining Museum, who had worked in Faynan and mapped out many hundreds of of ancient mines. And we added like 35% more mines to the picture. So the place is honeycombed with Iron Age mines. And they brought the ore to a number of smelting sites. And the biggest smelting site was Herbert and Nahas. And one of the interesting things that Andreas Hauptman did was he measured the amount of copper slag on the surface of sites through deep time, that is from the early Bronze Age through the Iron Age through the Roman period through the Islamic, early Islamic period across 2,000 years. Yeah. And what we see is that in the Iron Age, it's amazing that there's over 100,000 to 130,000 tons of slag covering the different sites in the area. In the Roman period, There's only like 40,000 to 70,000 tons of slag or over covering the Roman sites. So it's more than twice the amount of copper was being produced in the earlier Iron Age, the biblical period, than in the Roman period, when this region was part of the Eastern empire of the Romans. So what does that mean in terms of actual tonnage of copper? It means in the Iron Age, in Fainan and Rem, we're talking now we know through high precision radiocarbon dating, we know we're Talking only about two centuries, the 10th century BCE and the 9th century BCE they produced something like 6,500 to 13,000 tons of copper metal. And in the later Roman period it was only 2,500 to 7,000 tons. So this is absolutely incredible.
- [33:25]
A
Over those centuries in total or a.
- [33:28]
B
Year or two centuries, they produced in the Iron Age, in two centuries they produced 6,500 tons or up to 13,000 tons of metal, and they distributed it throughout the eastern Mediterranean. But let's remember, you got to look at everything in context. And so in the period before the biblical Iron Age, in the late Bronze Age, the main center of copper production was the island of Cyprus. But sometime around 1200 BCE, we have the collapse of civilizations of Bronze Age civilizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. So the Mycenaean Greeks, boom, kaput. The Hittites, kaput. The New Kingdom Egypt, it's put on its back legs. And this created a power vacuum for tiny societies, ethnic communities, if you like, around the southern Levant, to reorganize and use technology to advance their societies. And this kind of resonates with what happens today, even with the role of technological change enabling small scale societies to rise and punch way beyond their weight. Places like Israel, if you're thinking about the role of technology. And so that's what we see happening. The Edomites, there was a tradition of copper production in their area, but they figure out how in the 10th and 9th centuries, the to quantitatively expand it to levels that we can call the first industrial revolution. In the southern Levant, maybe there were.
- [35:52]
A
Edomites that King David went to fight a war with. It's just why the heck, you know, it's fun to have a signal from way over in left field come in and say the skeptical picture is actually the shallower picture. And when you dig deeper, it doesn't mean that the Bible is right, but what it means is that these historical signals don't dismiss them so quickly. In the earlier period, you have another argument, and here it's also a lot of things from the northern Negev, from the copper production of the northern Negev, where you trace out really a kind of fundamental human experience. You have this theoretical understanding among lay people myself, that the early hunter gatherer tribe and the earliest agricultural settlement that this hunter gatherer tribe slowly sort of sinks into is very egalitarian because there literally aren't the resources to produce stratification and elites and things like that. And then you argue that already in the Chalcolithic, from copper production, you can already see how metallurgy is a signal for a very early, much earlier than we would expect, beginning of human social stratification, of inequality, of elites, of trade networks that you would not have expected to find. So we heard the later story, the story of the Edomites. There's more there than anybody ever expected. And what's that earlier story? What do we know suddenly about the transfer, the transformation of the almost hunter gatherer, early agriculturalist into stratified society that's producing metallurgy?
- [37:41]
B
Well, what's so fascinating in Israel is that, as I mentioned earlier, it's the land bridge between Africa and Asia. And so a lot of human social evolution gets played out on a small scale on this land bridge between the two mega regions. And so for over a million years, societies in the southern Levant were hunter gatherers, okay, foragers. And then you get the Neolithic revolution sometime around 8000 BCE, something like that. Humans begin to control the production of food, their own production of food, through the domestication of plants and animals. And that goes on. That Neolithic process goes on for about 4,000 years until the Copper Age, the Chalcolithic, and even during the the Neolithic period, most sites, in fact, all the sites we know, even if they were large Neolithic sites, they were independent. They were autonomous village sites where you had social equality. There was very little evidence, there's very little evidence of variability in the size of buildings and so on on these Neolithic sites. So we can assume a kind of egalitarian lifeway. But then things begin to change in the Chalcolithic period. And one of the hearthlands for studying the Chalcolithic in the southern Levant is the Nachal Beersheba, which empties out into the Mediterranean through the Wadi Gaza. That's the main drainage system through the Northern Negev desert. And this becomes the heartland for the Chalcolithic. And it's absolutely fabulous. I mean, if you go to the Israel Museum, you'll see fantastic chalcolithic art objects and so on that come from this region. The northern Negev gets more or less enough water for dry land farming of barley. That's a traditional story up until the Zionist settlement of the northern Negev. That really begins around 1946 when they established a number of kibbutzim in this area. But the Bedouin had small scale plots to grow barley in different regions where you'd get enough rainfall in the Northern Negev region.
- [40:54]
A
And that was enough to sustain villages and communities and a heartland, as you call it, 5,000 years ago.
- [41:03]
B
We'll see what happens with the Chalcolithic in the Neolithic period. We find in the northern Negev that the little autonomous villages were very close on the Nahalp soar to freshwater springs. Okay, but then we believe that, and this is based on my surveys of the Northern Negeb, that there was an increase in population around these springs and people needed to move westward into, along the major wadis of the Northern Negev, like the Nahal Beersheba. And that's where we're coming into the Chalcolithic period, where we see these major changes in settlement. And so for the first time in the archaeology of Israel, we see settlement hierarchies where you have some large scale settlements along the Nahal Beersheba that are. Each one is about 10 hectares in size and around them are little daughter communities or satellite communities. So we have a two tier settlement hierarchy. And if we put our anthropological hats on, like as anthropological archeologists and we go to the ethnographic record of world cultures, we see that it's a typical signature of a chiefdom organization of social inequality when you have that two tier settlement hierarchy. And we have it in the Negev with sites like Biras Safadi in the Chalcolithic with the little sites around it near Beersheva and then at Shiqming with the site that I found with my colleague David Alon, where you have this 10 hectare site with all the daughter satellite communities around it. So that was the first signature, almost like a fingerprint of social inequality based on settlement pattern analysis.
- [43:29]
A
And then you get to the.
- [43:30]
B
Yeah, go ahead.
- [43:31]
A
No, that, that's that settlement pattern that says, wait a second, this is not the egalitarian, earliest kind of, or, you know, late Neolithic. This is already something else.
- [43:44]
B
This is something else. This is a the beginnings of real regional cultural systems. And in the Northern Negev, along the major wadis like Nahal Beersheva, Nahal Gharar, Nahl Patish, there are really distinct Chalcolithic cultures on those wadis who no doubt interacted, but they also had different subsistence strategies. So what we found in the Nachal Beersheva was the earliest evidence for irrigation farming, which supplemented this dry farming that I mentioned and you questioned me about earlier. And how do we know that they had irrigation farming in the Beersheba Valley? We found diversion walls on the different geological terraces that we could date to the Chalcolithic period up and down the Wadi Beersheva. So we could see that they were diverting water so that if the normal rainfall, like let's say at the peak of the Chalcolithic period, when you had maybe 100 millimeters more of rainfall than today, they could even supplement it more, creating a Mediterranean microenvironment along the wadi banks where they could farm. And then we had more evidence besides those archeological ones, where we looked at plant remains, we looked at the silica skeletal remains of grass plants like barley and wheat, which are called phytoliths. And we had a young. At the time, she was young like I was young, Arlene Rosen, who's now a professor at the University of Texas in Austin. But she was a pioneer in the study of phytoliths from archaeological sites. And I invited her in, like 1982 to study the sediment samples from Shiqmim. And when she analyzed it, she found that the phytoliths from barley were actually multi celled phytolith remains, which can only be produced by plants growing under irrigated conditions. So we had another avenue of evidence to show us that in the Chalcolithic, they developed irrigation farming as well.
- [46:47]
A
So here's the great anthropological question that ordinary people would just desperate to understand what caused it, what causes sudden stratification, sudden economic development, sudden technological change?
- [47:02]
B
In my opinion, I think the main stimulus, and really, we can't just use a monocausal explanation for anything, because there are different variables that no doubt work together. But one of the prime movers is probably population growth, because at a, at a certain level, the egalitarian way of organizing a society, you know, with, let's say, a big man who has no inherited position in the society, but he has to earn it through his prowess as a hunter or something like that, when you have a certain threshold of people, those systems are no longer. They no longer work. You need new Social organizations to organize people to be able to produce enough food to feed the growing population of a community. And so those are some of the factors that led to the rise of chiefs who could be responsible for helping to organize the farming activities and so on of a community and then collecting it and storing it for redistribution at a time of need. And that all gets validated, maybe through the development of new religious institutions. And that's something that we also see in the Chalcolithic period, with the emergence of the first temple sites, temple organizations, and in our part of the world and in the previous Neolithic periods, there's no evidence for temples in our specific area. There are Neolithic temples at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey and so on. But in our region, the temple institutions only appear in the Chalcolithic. And we only know of three of them to date. I mean, one is at Tulalat Gasol, northeast of the Dead Sea in Jordan. Another one's at Ein Gedi, and the third one is in the northern Negev Desert at Gilat, which I also excavated with David, and I published a big book on it and so on. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:04]
A
The development of religion, you see as a trust building of a society that needs to store food, that needs to prepare for the future where people work but don't keep all the labors, all the fruit of their labor, and therefore, there has to be a more cohering. And did you just say that? That is an absolutely fascinating point. Can you expand on that?
- [50:25]
B
I think religion plays a very important role in that. And the chiefs, the political leaders, were also the religious leaders. Probably. We don't reach the point of. At this formative period in the chalcolithic, where we're really getting the beginnings of the Mediterranean economy developing and so on. We don't have that kind of religious specialization of a true priestly class like in later historic periods. But chiefs probably had the knowledge that. The control of certain kinds of knowledge for subsistence farming, organizing the society around, like, a primitive calendar and so on, that required leadership. And the same thing with craft specialization. You know, craft specialization also develops during the Chalcolithic, and the metallurgy played an important role in that, because you can think of the chiefs as kind of controlling two kinds of economy, an elite prestige economy where they controlled craft production to produce objects that nobody else could, like these fabulous metal objects that we've seen in the cave of the treasure in the Judean Desert, the Chalcolithic treasure in Nahal Mishmar in the Judean Desert, and then their control of the store of Surplus economies. It's a two prong approach and anthropologists have shown that in many, many societies around the world.
- [52:34]
A
Working in Jordan under the UC San Diego umbrella, you brought two Israeli archaeologists to work with you on their PhDs at the sites in Jordan. They worked for five, six years in Jordan and that itself is interesting. In the immediate aftermath of a peace treaty. One of them, Erez Ben Yosef, who is now a leading archaeologist at Tel Aviv University and worked at the copper productions on Intimna. But he edited a festschrift, the German Word, for a book of essays honoring a scholar that people learned a lot from. That was published two years ago and in the introduction to it he writes that the book includes essays inspired by Levy's commitment to understanding social, political and economic processes in a long term or deep time perspective. What is deep time? I have always learned about social, political and economic processes that Erez is talking about here that are very limited in time. The migration of the Germanic tribes into the Roman frontier. It might be 300 years, but it's still very time limited, very clear. The processes, the response of the Latin speaking world, the sacking of Rome as sort of a highlight event. The Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution as a political event. The electrification of the Russian Empire. You cannot understand the pogroms of the 1880s without understanding the electrification of the Russian Empire underway under Tsar Alexander ii. What is deep time economic process or deep time social process? How do you do that in archeology and what do you learn from it?
- [54:14]
B
It's kind of like thinking of culture as a system, right? Where you have every culture has an economic subsystem, a trade system, a subsistence system, an ideological system. All cultures have that, but in different levels of complexity and in different levels of importance. But if we look at that kind of, if we think of societies as those kinds of systems, then we can study the changes, the ebbs and flows in relation to cultural evolution, when societies confront each other, and also how societies adapt to environmental changes and that sort of thing.
- [55:10]
A
Looking back on five decades of picking apart the desert sands to find semi arid sands, not quite desert, to find these unbelievably telltale signs. I mean, yeah, you find big things, but it takes years just to just to sift through one of these sites and then you can begin to piece together a story. We don't know these people's names, we don't know their culture, we don't know their experience. But we can know surprisingly more than we think from this just place that is otherwise dead to us. So you pull away this veil. What do you learn about people? What do you learn about societies? What do you learn about human development? Maybe human potential? What do you know about people after five decades of this kind of archaeology that goes to these fundamental moments in human development?
- [56:04]
B
Well, as you said, let's say I did four decades of desert archeology in the Holy Lands, okay? And after four decades, Khabiv, it was getting really hot. And so I decided to, to move into underwater archaeology. So I've been there for almost 10 years and my main research partner is Professor Asaf Yasor Landau from the University of Haifa, the Reconnaissance Institute for Maritime Studies. And he and I are doing essentially a deep time study of how societies adapt to coastal environments along the Carmel area of Israel. And it's really a treasure trove of archaeological sites, everything from ports to coastal installations to submerged sites to shipwrecks. And a lot of that work underwater was actually pioneered by archeologists from the University of Haifa over the last 50 years, including Professor Udi Galili, who for many years was the marine archaeologist for the Israel Antiquities Authority. Today he's a researcher professor at the University of Haifa. So Udi is kind of like a legend. And about seven years ago I was asked here at the University of California, San Diego to co direct the new Scripps center of Marine Archeology. And I knew if I wanted to kickstart it, I was going to work on my kind of archeology that is of the Southern Levant. And I also knew that because the University of Haifa were pioneers in underwater archeology, they would be the best people to partner with. And so that's what I started. And it's been fabulous. And we from UC San Diego brought a lot of paleo, environmental science, sediment coring and so on. We had a lot of experience with that here. And so I helped bring these together. And since then I've been very successful to get several million dollar grants to help promote this relationship between UC San Diego and the University of Haifa. And if I take one example.
- [59:15]
A
We.
- [59:15]
B
Go back to the Iron Age and we have found in our work we recently discovered three different Iron Age cargos. More from like the 9th, well, from the 11th century BCE, 9th century BCE and the 7th century BCE, different ships that happen to go down in the same general area in the Tantura Lagoon area just south of Tel Dor. So each one of those ancient cargoes is a time capsule on the societies, probably Phoenician societies, that were part of a huge maritime network around the Mediterranean. At that time. And what we're learning is that after the late Bronze Age collapse, different societies sort of cornered the market on different technologies. Like the Phoenicians cornered the market on seaborne trade around the Mediterranean. The Edomites cornered the market on copper production. Right. This is how these small societies evolved in our area.
- [60:53]
A
Amazing specialization. Very, very early.
- [60:56]
B
That's very early. There's a.
- [61:00]
A
Which means total dependence on trade, Right? Because the Edomites couldn't have used 6,000 tons of copper. Nobody needed 6,000 tons of copper. It was for the distribution channels. It was for the trade.
- [61:13]
B
And in fact, Udi Galili found a sunken cargo of copper ingots, a pile of over 100 of them, about this big, that he found near a place called Atlit Yam. And when they did chemical analyses of it, they did lead isotope analyses of those ingots. This was a study done by Shunama Yaalom Mak from the Hebrew University. She showed that those ingots found at Nevayam and came from Faynan and probably Khibat and Nahas, the site we excavated. This is incredible, you know, and that's just one example. Every year the sand is moving up and down the coast of Israel. It's going to expose new materials. But what I wanted to say, to bring up to you was something I just read about today. The new One of the Nobel Prize winners in economics is a guy named Yoel Moker. Okay? He's an Israeli American who got the Nobel as part of this group. And he's known for studying economic growth and technological. Economic innovation. And he highlights how rare it is in human history. And I think his work, he says, quote, by and large, the forces opposing technological progress have been stronger than those striving for changes. This is a book he wrote called the Lever of Riches. And he says the study of technological progress is therefore a study of exceptionalism, of cases in which, as a result of rare circumstances, the normal tendency of society to slide towards stasis and equilibrium was broken. So I think I just discovered this today, before I got on the call with you, that this guy's an economic historian who got the Nobel, and he has a connection to Israel. So I just ordered his book. I want to explore how his ideas about technological change might inform us on antiquity.
- [64:03]
A
There's a recurring theme here, that Israel stands out as innovative, as pioneering. There's something in the water here. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what it is from the Copper Age.
- [64:16]
B
There's something in the Water and think about how did ancient is like, what did ancient Israel use? What was their secret sauce to becoming a kingdom? I haven't answered that. You know, I look at this problem of biblical archaeology from the outside in. Okay. I'm always looking from biblical Edom, and I gave you examples of the Phoenician secret sauce. I gave you an example of the Edomite secret sauce. What was biblical Israel's secret sauce? Was it writing? Was it, you know, the democratization of society through innovation in writing? I don't know.
- [65:09]
A
We learned from you that there's reason to believe that there were significant countries, significant peoples with significant economic capabilities and social structures and political structures around them. And so something that they didn't know 30 years ago. And so maybe sometimes the secret sauce is. I remember in the class of Professor Martin Van Crefeld, a military historian, who opened our eyes to theories of why European success compared to in terms of modern bureaucratic development of the state and technology compared to other parts of the world. And one of them was the competitiveness. There were a great many parts of the world that were empires and controlled and more uniform and more politically cohesive, as opposed to the Europeans who were torn apart and constantly bickering and constantly. Because of the way the Roman Empire broke apart and the way the different tribes migrated and that constant competition between the French and the Germans, between the English and the French, between the Spanish and the Italians, was itself a driver of state building, a driver of military advancement, a driver of all kinds of things that over 500 years, a thousand years, 1500 years after the fall of the Roman Empire, became much, much more bureaucratically competent states that could then, you know, export themselves, so to speak, in the imperial age and in the age of exploration, itself created out of Israel, out of that unified kingdom that, you know, that 10th century kingdom, a much more competent, coherent kingdom.
- [66:38]
B
Yeah. And then you wonder about the whole process of innovation in Europe in light of this new political construct that they call the European Union. And it's not working.
- [66:56]
A
They're not fighting and they're not founding companies. They're not. And they're not inventing things. The Israelis are inventing more than the Europeans that live tiny little Israel. Maybe that's the end. Maybe humans need pressure, competition, to innovate, to produce, to bring radical change. Tom Levy, thank you so much for joining me. There's so much more that we're not going to get to, but there are going to be some links in the show notes so people can read more. Thank you so much for joining me. This was really fascinating.
- [67:28]
B
Thank you. And thanks for giving a plug for the new book, the Boomer Archaeologist.