43.

TRADE AND POWER IN LATE BRONZE AGE CANAAN

by Michael Sugerman
HE Late Bronze Age (15001150 B.C.E.) in Israel and Palestine has been a focus of research for over a century. A wealth of data from numerous archaeological and philological investigations creates the illusion that the cultures of the period are well known and understood. In reality, our interpretations of the period are based on (1) ceramic chronologies based largely on imported fine wares from the Aegean and Cyprus, (2) stratigraphic descriptions of a number of sites with LB phases, and (3) political and economic reconstructions extrapolated from texts found primarily in Egypt and Syria. Very few researchers have undertaken a detailed study of material culture from multiple sites to investigate sociocultural processes in the region. Instead, scholars of LB Canaan have relied on historical, rather than archaeological, methodologies to develop a framework for understanding the cultures of this period.

Modeling Political Society in LB Canaan Many analyses begin with the supposition that the region was part of an Egyptian province in Asia (see references in Naaman 1999:31), although there is some debate over the extent and coherence of this province (Lemche 1991; 1996; 1998). In a recent synthesis, one scholar describes the entire 350-year span almost exclusively in terms of hypothesized Egyptian political and military activity in the region (Gonen 1992). She concluded her analysis with a survey of artifactual and architectural typologies, with little discussion of the cultures, economies, or political structures of the region. In numerous other studies of the period, changes in settlement patterns, population density, and material culture have also been explained as results of historical events described in Egyptian or biblical texts (e.g., Aharoni 1967; Helck 1971; Naaman 1975; 1981). Paralleling the debate over Egyptian activities in LB Canaan, there has been some disagreement over how to determine the political boundaries of the city-states or kingdoms that filled the territory of Canaan in the latter half of the second millennium B.C.E. In recent years, the debate over the structure of politics and economy in LB Canaan has been argued mainly by two scholars, Israel Finkelstein (1993; 1996) and Nadav Naaman (1986; 1992; 1997; 1999), and has been based on the classic works of Albrecht Alt (1939; 1953; 1954) and Wolfgang Helck (1971).

Finkelstein and Naaman differ slightly in their interpretations of certain aspects of the Amarna letters (e.g., Finkelstein 1996:222; Naaman 1997:603), and more significantly, in their predispositions toward seeing city-states as centered on cities of different sizes. Thus, Finkelstein (1996:223) posits fewer citystates with larger urban centers and Naaman (1997: 605) suggests more city-states with smaller centers. Each of them, however, uses a similar set of assumptions to interpret the textual sources from Amarna, which are so often called upon to buttress arguments about LB society in Canaan. Both Finkelstein and Naaman state that the writers of all of the Amarna letters sent from Canaan must have been rulers of city-states (Naaman 1997:601). Finkelstein also presents a corollary to this argument: that the Amarna archive is representative enough to enable a full, or almost full reconstruction of the territorial map of Late Bronze Canaan (Finkelstein 1996:224). In order to build such a territorial map, Finkelstein divides the region into Thiessen polygons (figure 1). Each polygon is centered on a large, theoretically urban, site and contains the hinterland that he considers necessary to support the center (Finkelstein 1996:228, 230, 241). Though he recognizes that there were areas that could not be effectively controlled by the city-state rulers, and that nonsedentary segments of society were also important in this period, Finkelstein (1996:226) argues that control of the whole region comprising modern Israel and Palestine was divided among thirteen or fourteen neighboring polities with abutting boundaries. Naaman opposes Finkelsteins interpretation and argues that hinterland territory is not a necessary feature of an independent city-state. Using Egyptian texts to support his arguments, Naaman contends that during the Thirteenth Dynasty (eighteenth century B.C.E.), there were as many as four kingdoms within the limited geographical confines of the Akko Valley, none of which could have controlled the hinterland that Finkelstein claimed was necessary to support an urban center (Naaman 1997:605). Economic resources, including staples, could be obtained by the inhabitants of settlements in key zones, who therefore did not have to rely on local agricultural production. Port cities and settlements situated on major trade routesmost notably those on the junctions of trade routesfit this description. Another important implication of Naamans argument is that,

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Michael Sugerman many settlements were abandoned in favor of pastoral lifeways. Given the lack of surplus laboras discerned by the absence of major building projects during this periodit is difficult to hypothesize that the urban elites were able to muster militias of the size necessary to enforce their proposed jurisdictions. Textual descriptions of the military forces gathered in Canaanite cities on military maneuvers list dozens or hundreds, rather than thousands, of fighters (ANET3 p. 237). It appears that large standing military forces were not an integral part of LB urban politics. Beyond the issue of local jurisdiction there is, as noted above, some debate over the question of regional dominance as well. Thus Finkelstein (1996: 22526) argues that the populations in Canaan were all under the jurisdiction of the ruling Canaanite elites, while Naaman (1997:619) argues that Egypt governed Canaan and the real power was in the hands of the Egyptians. Neither of these arguments defines the nature of the governance nor the means by which the proposed rulers were supported. City-States Problems Underlying these omissions is a methodological problem. These scholars use, as have many others in the past, the model of the city-state to characterize the urban-centered polities that they propose comprised the LB political landscape of Canaan. The city-state model links the phenomenon of the state with a particular kind of settlement pattern that together form small, territorially based, politically independent state systems, characterized by a capital city or town, with an economically and socially integrated adjacent hinterland (Rihll and Wilson 1991: 60; Charlton and Nichols 1997:1). Other definitions of city-states include the concept that the polity is economically self-sufficient and perceived as being ethnically distinct from other, similar systems (Trigger 1993:814; 2003:92103). It has been argued that, historically, city-states frequently occurred in groups of somewhat evenly spaced units that were all of similar sizes (Renfrew 1975:1220). The city-state construct has been the target of criticism in recent years. In many of the cases where the term has been applied, one or more core features of the models definition have been changed to fit the case. In some cases, researchers have reinterpreted the data to fit the model (DAltroy 2000:851; Yoffee 2004:4262). In the case of Canaan, the model has been used so often to describe so many different conditions that it has very little utility for characterizing any particular political or economic situation. By using a poorly defined model and applying it uncriti-

given the smaller sizes of his proposed political units, many small cities and towns would have existed outside the control of any city-state. If that was the case, not all politically independent polities were states or even cities.

Figure 1. Thiessen polygons defining proposed Late Bronze Age city-states in Canaan Naamans critique highlights an important flaw in Finkelsteins model: the issue of control. Although Finkelstein acknowledged that there would have been marginal areas outside the control of the city-states in a practical sense, he considered all of the territory to be under the jurisdiction of the nearest ruling Canaanite city (1996:22526). No mention is made of the structure of this control or how this jurisdiction was maintained. Stager (1985) and Bunimovitz (1994a) have argued that the LB in southern Canaan was characterized by a shortage of manpower after

Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan cally across a widely variable social, political, and geographical map, Finkelstein, Naaman, and others who use the city-state model obscure the heterogeneous nature of political society in LB Canaan. In two recent surveys of archaeological incarnations of city-states in many cultures, perhaps the most useful result was the argument that researchers need to explore the variability within the model and explain significant divergences from the model when they are encountered in the archaeological or historical data (Nichols and Charlton 1997; Yoffee 1997: 256; Hansen 2000). Although there may be evidence in LB Canaan for city-states of the type defined above, the range of variation in settlement size and type in the region was great. No understanding of the society of the LB is complete without an exploration of the way urban and nonurban settlements, as well as nonsedentary segments of the population, were integrated into the political and economic systems extant during this period. Modeling the LB Local Economy The apparently conflicting archaeological and textual data used to investigate LB Canaan have led to two schools of thought, in which scholars choose to emphasize their interpretations of the texts, on the one hand, or the archaeological data, on the otherbut not both. The archaeologically based interpretation proposes that the combination of Egyptian military occupation and internal conflicts caused a long process of economic decline in Canaan, until it reached a low point during the thirteenth century B.C.E. (Knapp 1989a; 1989b; 1992). The alternative, textually supported interpretation, is that the rulers of the Eighteenth Dynasty received rich tribute from the kings of Canaanite city-states, which led to intensification of Egyptian military and economic activities there, which in turn caused the local Canaanite economies to expand so that by the thirteenth century the region was flourishing (Bienkowski 1989; Naaman 1981: 185). Other recent syntheses have attempted to harmonize these conflicting points of view with only slight success. Gonen (1984; 1992) downgraded some of the textual evidence from Amarna in favor of archaeological data that indicate the presence of depleted urban settlements. Bunimovitz (1993; 1994b; 1995) used settlement-pattern studies and models of peer-polity interaction together with the textual evidence from Amarna to identify multiple responses to Egypts impact on Canaan during the LB. He argued that the collapse of the socioeconomic system at the end of the Middle Bronze Age and the imperialistic

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designs of Egypt during the following centuries led to a response in which the diminished urban elite indulged in orgies of conspicuous consumption in an attempt to maintain power within an impoverished and unstable region (Bunimovitz 1995:326). At the same time, the rural inhabitants of the country, previously the productive foundation of the regions wealth, responded to the rising demands of the elites and the instability of the political structure by voting with their feet. Agrarian populations shifted to nonsedentary lifestyles in which their produce could not easily be taxed by the urban authorities (Bunimovitz 1995:32728; also Braudel 1972:85101; Marfoe 1979). In this model, the wealth listed in Egyptian tribute texts is explained by the activities of the urban elite, while the pattern of depletion, destruction, and poverty indicated by the regions archaeological record is attributed, in part, to a large-scale shift from sedentary agriculture to nomadic lifeways. Both of these syntheses deal differently with the evidence for concentrations of wealth as described in Egyptian records and apparent in some aspects of LB Canaanite material culture. While arguing that an Egyptian occupation brought about the decline of the Canaanite city, Gonen also argued that, in the LB, Canaan was producing large quantities of highprestige products, including monumental stone sculpture, richly dyed textiles, ornamental jewelry, carved ivory figurines, and inlaid furniture and boxes. In support of this apparent dichotomy between decline and wealth, Gonen (1992:247) asserted only that Canaan was an active participant in the broader eastern Mediterranean economy, without explaining how such an economically depleted region played an active economic role. Bunimovitzs (1995:326) explanation is more instructive, implying that the activities of the urban elite in concentrating wealth, both for themselves and as tribute gifts to Egypt, were short term in nature and could not have been supported for an extended period. Indeed, their activities were curtailed in the thirteenth century, at the end of the LB. Unfortunately, neither synthesis presents a satisfying approach to the political economy of the LB because they both ignore the patterns of production and distribution of goods within the region during that period. Lateral Directions in Bronze Age Trade Recent analyses of the archaeological data available for the Early and Middle Bronze Age have identified settlement patterns in which sites are oriented along drainages running east-west from the inland high-

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Michael Sugerman military forces; and (3) it situates the individual dendritic systems within a larger context in which they are competing for the attention of an overseas market (Bronson 1977:4445). In the case of southeast Asia, those markets were in China and Java. In the case of LB Canaan, those markets were found in Egypt, the northern Levantine coast, and Cyprus. Bronsons model focuses on a subset of dendritic models, an exchange network along a drainage that opens to the sea with the following elements (see figure 2): A the center at the mouth of the drainage

lands to the Mediterranean coast (Harrison 1993; Ilan 1995; Marcus 1991; 1995; Raban 1985). Although this pattern has been related to the significance of maritime trade in the economy of Bronze Age Canaan (Stager 1992; 2000), it is notable that this orientation was already in existence in the Chalcolithic period (45003500 B.C.E.), when maritime trade was less important (Levy 1995:229). Ilan (1995:302) has argued that the drainage systems, with estuarine ports, large inland urban sites, and small rural productive sites, comprised a unified polity. Although such a model might explain the distribution of goods among the coastal and inland sites, it does not go so far as to explain how the economy worked, and why it worked. It also fails to address the same key issue inadequately addressed in the political models presented by Finkelstein and Naaman, namely, control. Ilans model assumes a great deal of coercive control over the areas of rural production and less habitable areas of resource collection in the hill country. In the Middle Bronze Age, the period about which Ilan wrote, the population sizes may have been large enough to allow for the kind of coercive control that is indicated by his arguments (Ilan 1995:309). However, in the subsequent Late Bronze Age, with its pronounced reduction in sedentary population and thus in workforce, it is unlikely that the rulers of the urban centers were able to coerce the hinterland populations into providing goods for their markets by force. Rather, the centers had to have something to offer that would have brought the nonurban segments of the population into the system by choice. In the 1970s, economists developed a model that describes these dendritic market systems as a variation on classical central place models. The dendritic model was initially used to investigate long-distance wholesale trade in America during the sixteenth through twentieth centuries (Vance 1970). The model was almost immediately applied to market systems in developing economies (Johnson 1970) and then to historically known cases, such as the political and economic structures of early coastal states in southeast Asia (Bronson 1977; Hall 1985). More recently, Stager (2000) adapted Bronsons work to develop an understanding of Early and Middle Bronze Age Canaan that he calls the port power model. Coastal Approaches to Trade Networks A dendritic model is useful for the purposes of this study for several reasons: (1) it is designed to explain the relations between sites in a networked trade system; (2) in most cases, it describes intersite relations that are noncoercive and do not necessitate extensive

B and C second- and third-order centers located upstream from A and at the junctures of other drainages D E and F the most distant upstream center in the system; a concentration point for goods the ultimate producers or collectors of the products that are concentrated at D; they may be centers in a different kind of nonmarket exchange system involving goods of which only part are involved in the Abased system an overseas center that serves as the main consumer of As exports and the main supplier of its imports other coastal centers some distance away, dominating systems similar to As

A1 A2

Aside from these elements, this model also operates under three other constraints: (1) X, the overseas center, is economically stronger than A, has a larger population, and a more productive economy; (2) the countryside between the drainages is such that movements of goods outside of the drainages is not feasible; and (3) the drainage basin cannot support its population based solely on agriculture, thus making the profits derived from trade of central importance (Bronson 1977:4344). In the case of LB Canaan, the first constraint is applicable. New Kingdom Egypt to the southand even Ugarit to the northwas wealthier and more populous than any coastal city in Canaan. The second constraint is not as good a fit in that the land between the drainage systems does not preclude the passage of goods. Rather, the geography simply makes the use of the drainages the easiest choice in many areas, though it allows producers and traders to cross-cut

Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan

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Figure 2. Idealized depiction of a dendritic trade system anchored in a port center (after Bronson 1977) the drainage-based economic systems. This flexibility puts certain pressures on the centers (especially B, C, and D) to make themselves as attractive as possible to the upstream groups to avoid losing their patronage. The third constraint can only be applied to Canaan in a limited manner. While the spring-fed lowlands of southern Canaan can be successfully dry-farmed, the risk of drought and starvation has more than once led sedentary populations to abandon agriculture and take up a pastoral lifestyle dependent on a more heterogeneous set of resources (Finkelstein 1988; Ilan 1995:314; Marfoe 1979:9). Thus, while it was possible for the urban elite in the coastal plain to support themselves by extracting produce from a farming population, such a state of affairs was unlikely to last for an extended period. Slight variations in the climate, population growth, disease, or changes in other aspects of the socioeconomy of the region continually undermined the possibility of developing a true peasant culture in Canaan. As a result, as Bronsons model would predict, the revenues derived from trade became extremely important to the urban centers that controlled the flows of goods both into and out of Canaan. Hierarchies of sites have been identified in this region by other scholars, though they have not been set into this type of economic system. Gittlen (1993: 36768) defined a three-tiered LB hierarchy of site types consisting of walled cities, baronial estates, and unfortified settlements. Ilans MB hierarchy contained regional centers and gateways, subregional centers and/or loci of specialist production or service (e.g., cult), villages, and farmsteads (Ilan 1995:305). Knapp, in characterizing a similar economic system for Middle and Late Bronze Age Cyprus, defined a hierarchy in which he assigned a variety of functions to each type of site: primary coastal centers (commercial, ceremonial, administration, production); secondary inland towns (administration, production, transport); tertiary inland sites (ceremonial, production, transport, storage); and mining sites, potteryproducing villages, and agricultural support villages (production, storage, transport) (Knapp 1997:5661). The variety of functions that Knapp attributes to each type of site provides a more detailed image of the human activities taking place throughout the networks of production and exchange, but the relationships among the sites in his model are no more well-

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Michael Sugerman Mirsim. Each of the southern sites are B- or C-level sites in the trade networks of the LB. While the A-level sites were probably trading these imports upstream to the B- and C-level partners, it is the third segment of Leonards data that best supports the argument that these secondary centers were using exotic goods to entice upstream inhabitants into the network. At forty-eight sites (70 percent of the sample), ten or fewer examples of Mycenaean pottery were found. In Canaan, these sites range from Tel Dan in the north to Tell elFarah (South). This class of sites also includes six sites in Jordan, indicating, along with the Amman finds, that there was an eastern overland extension to the networks that ran from the sea to the Jordan Valley (Leonard 1976:465). Leonards analysis of Mycenean ceramic imports undermines the economic arguments of the city-state model by showing that the majority of these elite artifacts were found at port centers. In fact, these artifacts are present in much smaller numbers at many of the settlements that have been proposed as centers of city-states (Leonard 1976; 1987). The pattern of distribution identified by Leonard runs counter to the argument that symbols of wealth were amassed by the rulers of urban city-states in shows of conspicuous consumption (Bunimovitz 1995:326). A recent comprehensive study of Mycenean pottery in the Levant argues the opposite: in urban economic centers, these imports are found in residences associated with a wide range of socioeconomic groups. Their distributions at smaller centers are less clear, in part because of the lack of data about these smaller sites, but these imports seem to be limited to elite social contexts at lower-order inland sites (van Wijngaarden 2002:10924). The routes upon which imports were carried are conspicuous archaeologically because the colorfully decorated Aegean sherds can be seen easily among the plain wares common to LB Canaan. But were these same routes used to carry goods in the opposite direction? The dendritic model posited here focuses primarily on the bulking of goods: the increasing concentration of goods at successive notes along the network. In order to support this side of the argument, we must be able to identify that process archaeologically. While exotic goods may be seen as one method of enticing lower-order sites into the network, utilitarian goods and raw resources are the likely objectives of those in the higher-order sites downstream. Utilitarianor staplegoods include those that are (1) found in a range of socioeconomic contexts, indicating that they were common artifacts used in daily life; (2) found at many sites, indicating

defined than in other models that have been proposed for Canaan. Knapps primary and secondary centers somehow control production of inland agricultural and mineral resources, and transport the products from the production centers out to the coastal capitals. Knapp (1997:62) hints at the possibility of a king overseeing the entire system, and of a governing elite, but again the nature of that dominance is not defined. In each of these models, what is missing is the impetus for the hinterland communities to take part in the exchange network. Contrary to political or economic models that assume coercive relations between high- and low-order centers within a state-level system, dendritic models consider relations between sites on either end of the system to be somewhat egalitarian (Bronson 1977:44). Since D-level sites are simply concentration points for goods often produced by mobile populations, military solutions to problems in the trading relationships would be impractical. One method to bring peripheral populations into the network would be to offer manufactured or exotic goods that are otherwise unavailable and that might induce D to enter the network voluntarily. Tracing the Networks It is clear that exotic goods were transferred from the coastal centers to the upstream sites in LB Canaan, as demonstrated by Leonards work on the distribution of Mycenean pottery in the Levant (Leonard 1976; 1981; 1987). Of the sixty-nine sites discussed by Leonard, six produced more than one hundred Mycenaean vessel lots (or minimum number of vessels). Of those six, three are important coastal centers where such finds would be expected: Ugarit, Byblos, and Tell Abu Hawam. Two more sites are secondary centers on major trade routes: Kamid el-Loz and Megiddo. The sixth site is Amman, east of the Jordan River. While this might be seen as an unexpected addition to the previous five, perhaps it illustrates the high status of such goods when they were moved inland away from the coastal centers, because all 150 items at that site were excavated in the temple discovered on the site of the Amman airport (Hankey 1974; for other arguments on the status of Mycenean ceramics in Levantine sites, see also Leonard and Cline 1998; van Wijngaarden 1999; 2002). Fourteen sites on Leonards list produced between ten and one hundred vessel lots, and again these are not surprising sites: the coastal centers Tell Sukas, Sarepta, Ashdod, Ashkelon, and Gaza, and the inland sites Alalakh, Hazor, Taanach, Beth-shean, Shechem, Gezer, Beth-shemesh, Lachish, and Tell Beit

Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan a role as an item of trade; and (3) suitable for provenience analysis, making it possible to map the routes of that trade. Canaanite jars, one of the most common artifact types excavated at LB sites in Israel and Palestine, are one type of artifact that conforms to all of these criteria. By identifying the proveniences of Canaanite jar samples collected from many sites, it should be possible to ascertain the routes over which these transport and storage jars were carried. The patterns of distribution and the directionality of trade should reflect these jars role in the economic system of the LB. The two models already discussed here each posit different types of trade relations among sites and regions within Canaan. City-states are characterized as having a capital citywith an economically and socially integrated adjacent hinterland (Charlton and Nichols 1997:1). The capital city thus accumulates goods produced in a number of dependent settlementspossibly a very large number of settlements, depending on the extent of the hinterland controlled by the capital. As a result, ceramic samples collected from capital cities should exhibit a wide variety of production sources (reflecting both regional differences in the composition of the clays and technical choices on the part of the potters), while samples from satellite settlements should show less variation. In addition, trade among capital cities should not be limited to any particular direction. Alternatively, the port-centered, dendritic trade model posits a process in which the transport of local goods and resources is largely a one-way journey. Goods collected in the hinterlands are consolidated at small settlements far upstream. Those goods are then joined to shipments from similar sites and funneled downstream through higher-level nodes until they reach the port center that dominates the economy of the network. As a result, ceramic samples collected from downstream sites should indicate a large variety of proveniences, and samples from the port center should show the greatest amount of variation. Conversely, samples collected from upstream sites should indicate fewer production sources. In contrast to the city-state model, local ceramics should indicate a strong directionality in their distribution. Samples from downstream production centers should not be found in large quantities at upstream sites. In a recent project, I collected samples of Canaanite jars from Deir el-Bala, Lachish, Ashdod (south shore), Tel Miqne-Ekron, Tel Batash, Tel Taanach, Tel Nami, Tel Megadim, Tell Abu Hawam, Hazor, and Tel Dan. This sample includes large urban inland settlements, small inland settlements, large port cen-

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ters and small coastal settlements. The political, economic, and geographic diversity of the sites provided the basis for a comprehensive test of the city-state and dendritic models. The detailed results of my petrographic analyses of those samples have been presented elsewhere and strongly support the predictions of the dendritic model (Sugerman 2000). In each of the 273 samples of Canaanite jars that were analyzed, the provenience of the sample was identified as either east of its archaeological findspot or in the case of some coastal sitesto the north. The great majority of the ceramic groups were distributed within bounded ranges that, with the exception of the samples found at coastal sites, did not spread far to the north or south of the latitude in which they were produced (Sugerman 2000:122). Further Investigations of LB Economic Structures The sources of data most often used to model the political and economic structures of LB Canaan are elite artifacts and architecture, and documents from royal or other elite contexts. The city-state model commonly used as a baseline for modeling Canaanite political economy can be supported only by restricting the types of data used in ones analysis. The documentary support for this model is based largely on the assumption that each person who wrote either to Pharaoh or to his officials was a city-state ruler (Naaman 1997:602), even though only a small number of the archaeologically known LB settlements can be identified in the Amarna archives. Most scholars are willing to assume that all of the other known settlements must have been subordinate to the settlements documented in the archives (for example, Finkelstein 1996:224). The Amarna archive has also been used to support the argument that Canaan was an extension of imperial Egypt during the New Kingdom and that the rulers of the city-states were largely governing on behalf of the pharaoh. Along with these documents, scholars have suggested that Egyptian artifacts excavated in Canaanpottery, scarab seals, alabaster vessels, and jewelryare evidence for New Kingdom domination or outright military occupation of the region (Weinstein 1981:2022). The presence of these highprestige Egyptian artifacts at a given site is often argued to be evidence for Egyptian governance (Bietak 1993; Dever 1985; Hoffmeier 1989:189). But the evidence in support of this model of Egyptian political domination is actually quite weak; I will address the issue in a forthcoming article titled Competition or Colonization? Disruption and Destruction in the Late Bronze Age Levant.

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Michael Sugerman Canaan is drawn from documentary sources. Data resulting from archaeological assessments of elite goods do not unambiguously undermine the city-state model, but they do support a dendritic systems model, with networks anchored in wealthy port centers (Leonard 1976; 1987). When archaeological data that reflect the staple economy are brought into the mix, the evidence for a dendritic system increases greatly. In order to test further the utility of either model for explaining the economy of LB Canaan, archaeologists need to continue to add to the range of data available, and to shift our economic focus from urban centers and eye-catching exotic goods to the archaeology of ordinary things.

The limitations and assumptions noted above have made it difficult to model the political economy of Canaanite society coherently, and have led archaeologists to construct conflicting and inconsistent models based on either limited textual sources or limited archaeological datasets. The belief common among archaeologists that the LB is one of the best illuminated periods (Gonen 1992:211) results from ignoring these constraints. The absence of investigations of the staple economy of Canaan has created a bias toward seeing economic behavior and power reflected only in an artificially constrained range of artifact types and data sources. The majority of the data used to support the city-state model for LB

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