Event: Pizza Talk: "The Iron Age and Late Antique Southern Levant: New Insights from the UCLA Ancient Agriculture and Paleoethnobotany Laboratory"

Speaker: Dr. Alan Farahani, Postdoctoral Scholar, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA

This talk is a summary of the research conducted by the research participants of the Ancient Agriculture and Paleoethnobotany Laboratory at the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology under the supervision of Postdoctoral Scholar Alan Farahani. Each research participant will present the results of their individual analyses on material deriving from the archaeological site of Dhiban, Jordan, inhabited ca. 1000 BCE to the present. The site of Dhiban (ancient Dibon) was the center of an Iron Age (ca. 800 - 600 BCE) polity known as Moab, and participants will present the results of archaeobotanical and artifactual analyses of a unique midden context from the most recent 2017 excavations. Moreover, laboratory members will also discuss the results of ceramic, faunal, and metallurgical analyses of material recovered from a Late Byzantine (ca. 550 CE) storeroom uncovered at Dhiban in 2013 and 2017. The cultural and historical implications of these data will be discussed with respect to the wider region of the southern Levant.