Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean - Terje Stordalen

Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean - Terje Stordalen

5. Drivers of Accumulative Cultural Production in the Southern Levant: The View from Tall Hisban, Jordan

Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean - Terje Stordalen

Øystein S. LaBianca [+-]
Andrews University
Øystein S. LaBianca (PhD Brandeis 1987) is a senior research professor of anthropology at Andrews University and associate director of its Institute of Archaeology. He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of over 20 books on Jordanian archaeology, including the 14-volume Hesban Final Publication Series. LaBianca is a founding co-director of the Madaba Plains Project, excavating at Tall Ḥisbān, Tall al-ʿUmayri, and Tall Jalūl, and senior director of the Hesban Cultural Heritage Project, a community archaeology initiative focused on engaging the local community in the care, protection, and presentation of this important site. He has served on the boards of the American Society of Overseas Research and the American Center of Research. LaBianca has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford, and Bergen universities and has received grants from National Geographic, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of State, and the Research Council of Norway.
Jeffrey P. Hudon [+-]
Andrews University and Bethel College
Jeffrey P. Hudon (PhD Andrews University YEAR) currently serves as the Administrative Director of the Khirbat Safra Excavation Project in Jordan, while working as a member of the Jalūl and Muḍaybiʿ (Karak Resources Project) final publication teams. He teaches Old Testament and Hebrew courses at the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University and serves as the administrative assistant for the Institute of Archaeology, as well as an adjunct professor of religion at Bethel University and Grace College. He has 20 seasons of field excavation experience at sites in Jordan (Jalūl, Ḥisbān, and Safra), Israel (Ketef Hinnom and Ramat Rahel), and Turkey (Elmali), and has written over 30 scholarly publications.

Description

In this chapter, our goal is to lay open for criticism and discussion an approach to interpretation of Tall Hisban’s past that foregrounds the role of various drivers or agencies in shaping cultural production and change over the long-term at this important Jordanian archaeological site. Our approach thus departs from more conventional approaches to such interpretations that typically focus on prevailing discourses about particular historical periods and transitions. Inspired by the research agenda of the LDG collaboration, our focus is instead on Tall Hisban (or simply Hisban) as a window on long-term, local cultural production as impacted by various local and global agencies of cultural persistence and change. To carry out this analysis we deploy the analytical tools or lenses of the Accumulative Cultural Production model (ACP) introduced in Part I of this volume. The primary focus of our analysis using these tools are the well-documented cycles of intensification and abatement that characterize Hisban’s multi-millennial history. Our goal with this analysis is to distinguish empirical instances of Fernand Braudel’s tri-part schema of history in the archaeological record of Tall Hisban.By means of this line of analysis our research enabled us to bring to light ten key drivers of accumulative cultural production and change at Tall Hisban: the ecology of local food systems; the leveling effect of endemic polycentrism; the flourishing of variously anti-imperial social and Scriptural canons; the hard and soft cultural legacies of dynastic and imperial powers; local-level resistance and resilience strategies; accumulative world system economic expansions and pulsations; incidents of extreme events such as earthquakes, famines, and epidemics; cycles of environmental regeneration and degradation; cultural transformations occasioned by the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene; and accumulative patterns of entrapment and entanglement. The chapter concludes by noting certain limitations of the proposed collection of drivers and by positing a way forward for further refinement of both the ACP model and the proposed drivers.

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Citation

LaBianca, Øystein; Hudon, Jeffrey. 5. Drivers of Accumulative Cultural Production in the Southern Levant: The View from Tall Hisban, Jordan. Levantine Entanglements - Cultural Productions, Long-Term Changes and Globalizations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 146-188 Nov 2021. ISBN 9781781799123. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=38444. Date accessed: 07 Oct 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.38444. Nov 2021

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