UC San Diego

During the Iron Age (ca. 1200-800 BCE), society in the Faynan region of southern Jordan experienced intertwined technological and cultural revolutions, transforming from opportunistic copper production by segmentary tribes of pastoral nomads to industrial-scale metallurgy connected to a regional polity. Previous research in Faynan identified a pinnacle in metallurgy in terms of scale and efficiency during the 10th-9th centuries BCE; yet these advancements were followed by an abrupt industry abandonment by the end of the 9th century BCE with no associated evidence of natural or human intervention such as drought or warfare. Furthermore, while Iron Age Faynan and its copper industry have been the subject of numerous studies and publications, most previous archaeometallurgical research has focused on slag (the waste byproduct of metal production), other components of the metallurgical chaîne opératoire, or only included limited investigations concerning the actual metal. This dissertation aims to fill these scholarly lacunae by investigating the final phases of copper smelting in Iron Age Faynan from the perspective of the metal produced to test if a failure in the metallurgical industry drove a societal collapse. To do so, a combination of theoretical perspectives from anthropology, ecology, and sociology is applied to an original dataset produced using methods from the social, natural, and computer sciences. At the core of this dissertation is the application of the adaptive cycle from Resilience Theory to construct a holistic model of the trajectory of society and copper production across the entire Iron Age sequence with particular emphasis on its “collapse” phase. Using archaeological excavation, scanning electron microscopy and mass spectrometry, this possible “collapse” was investigated with a robust dataset of elementally analyzed copper and iron metal from Khirbat al-Jariya and Khirbat en-Nahas, two of the largest Iron Age copper smelting centers in Faynan. Together, the analytical results and the theoretical approach reveal a “collapse” in the Iron Age social-ecological system of Faynan that was likely driven by socio-economic factors in the greater Eastern Mediterranean rather than internal disruptions to the metallurgical industry.