43.
TRADE AND POWER IN LATE BRONZE AGE CANAAN
by Michael Sugerman
T HE Late Bronze Age (1500—1150 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 Ae-
gean 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 re-
searchers have undertaken a detailed study of mate-
rial culture from multiple sites to investigate socio-
cultural processes in the region. Instead, scholars of
LB Canaan have relied on historical, rather than ar-
chaeological, 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 Na»aman 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 de-
scribed in Egyptian or biblical texts (e.g., Aharoni
1967; Helck 1971; Na»aman 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 Na»aman (1986; 1992; 1997; 1999),
and has been based on the classic works of Albrecht
Alt (1939; 1953; 1954) and Wolfgang Helck (1971).
Finkelstein and Na»aman differ slightly in their inter-
pretations of certain aspects of the Amarna letters
(e.g., Finkelstein 1996:222; Na»aman 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 city-
states with larger urban centers and Na»aman (1997:
605) suggests more city-states with smaller centers.
Each of them, however, uses a similar set of assump-
tions to interpret the textual sources from Amarna,
which are so often called upon to buttress arguments
about LB society in Canaan. Both Finkelstein and
Na»aman state that the writers of all of the Amarna
letters sent from Canaan must have been rulers of
city-states (Na»aman 1997:601). Finkelstein also pre-
sents 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 consid-
ers 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, Finkel-
stein (1996:226) argues that control of the whole re-
gion comprising modern Israel and Palestine was
divided among thirteen or fourteen neighboring poli-
ties with abutting boundaries.
Na»aman opposes Finkelstein’s interpretation and
argues that hinterland territory is not a necessary fea-
ture of an independent city-state. Using Egyptian
texts to support his arguments, Na»aman contends
that during the Thirteenth Dynasty (eighteenth cen-
tury 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 hin-
terland that Finkelstein claimed was necessary to
support an urban center (Na»aman 1997:605). Eco-
nomic 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 routes—most notably those on the junc-
tions of trade routes—fit this description. Another
important implication of Na»aman’s argument is that,
440 Michael Sugerman
given the smaller sizes of his proposed political units,
many small cities and towns would have existed out-
side 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
Na»aman’s critique highlights an important flaw in
Finkelstein’s 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 (1996:225–26). No mention is made
of the structure of this control or how this “jurisdic-
tion” was maintained. Stager (1985) and Bunimovitz
(1994a) have argued that the LB in southern Canaan
was characterized by a shortage of manpower after
many settlements were abandoned in favor of pas-
toral lifeways. Given the lack of surplus labor—as
discerned by the absence of major building projects
during this period—it 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 re-
gional dominance as well. Thus Finkelstein (1996:
225–26) argues that the populations in Canaan were
all under the jurisdiction of the ruling Canaanite el-
ites, while Na»aman (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 com-
prised the LB political landscape of Canaan. The
city-state model links the phenomenon of the state
with a particular kind of settlement pattern that to-
gether form “small, territorially based, politically
independent state systems, characterized by a capital
city or town, with an economically and socially inte-
grated 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 (Trig-
ger 1993:8–14; 2003:92–103). It has been argued
that, historically, city-states frequently occurred in
groups of somewhat evenly spaced units that were all
of similar sizes (Renfrew 1975:12–20).
The city-state construct has been the target of criti-
cism in recent years. In many of the cases where the
term has been applied, one or more core features of
the model’s definition have been changed to fit the
case. In some cases, researchers have reinterpreted
the data to fit the model (D’Altroy 2000:851; Yoffee
2004:42–62). In the case of Canaan, the model has
been used so often to describe so many different con-
ditions that it has very little utility for characterizing
any particular political or economic situation. By
using a poorly defined model and applying it uncriti-
 Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan
cally across a widely variable social, political, and
geographical map, Finkelstein, Na»aman, and others
who use the city-state model obscure the heterogene-
ous nature of political society in LB Canaan.
In two recent surveys of archaeological incarna-
tions 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 ex-
plain significant divergences from the model when
they are encountered in the archaeological or histori-
cal 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 em-
phasize their interpretations of the texts, on the one
hand, or the archaeological data, on the other—but
not both. The archaeologically based interpretation
proposes that the combination of Egyptian military
occupation and internal conflicts caused a long proc-
ess 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 sup-
ported interpretation, is that the rulers of the Eight-
eenth 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; Na»aman 1981:
185).
Other recent syntheses have attempted to harmo-
nize these conflicting points of view with only slight
success. Gonen (1984; 1992) downgraded some of
the textual evidence from Amarna in favor of ar-
chaeological data that indicate the presence of de-
pleted urban settlements. Bunimovitz (1993; 1994b;
1995) used settlement-pattern studies and models of
peer-polity interaction together with the textual evi-
dence from Amarna to identify multiple responses to
Egypt’s 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
441
designs of Egypt during the following centuries led to
a response in which the diminished urban elite in-
dulged 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, previ-
ously the productive foundation of the region’s
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 non-
sedentary lifestyles in which their produce could not
easily be taxed by the urban authorities (Bunimovitz
1995:327–28; also Braudel 1972:85–101; 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 region’s archaeological re-
cord 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 high-
prestige products, including monumental stone sculp-
ture, richly dyed textiles, ornamental jewelry, carved
ivory figurines, and inlaid furniture and boxes. In
support of this apparent dichotomy between “de-
cline” 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. Bunimovitz’s (1995:326) ex-
planation is more instructive, implying that the activi-
ties 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 sup-
ported for an extended period. Indeed, their activities
were curtailed in the thirteenth century, at the end of
the LB.
Unfortunately, neither synthesis presents a satisfy-
ing approach to the political economy of the LB be-
cause 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-
442 Michael Sugerman
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 Ca-
naan (Stager 1992; 2000), it is notable that this orien-
tation was already in existence in the Chalcolithic
period (4500–3500 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 pro-
ductive 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 pre-
sented by Finkelstein and Na»aman, namely, control.
Ilan’s model assumes a great deal of coercive con-
trol over the areas of rural production and less habit-
able 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). How-
ever, 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 varia-
tion 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 south-
east Asia (Bronson 1977; Hall 1985). More recently,
Stager (2000) adapted Bronson’s work to develop an
understanding of Early and Middle Bronze Age Ca-
naan 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 sys-
tem; (2) in most cases, it describes intersite relations
that are noncoercive and do not necessitate extensive
military forces; and (3) it situates the individual den-
dritic systems within a larger context in which they
are competing for the attention of an “overseas” mar-
ket (Bronson 1977:44–45). 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.
Bronson’s 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
B and C second- and third-order centers located
upstream from A and at the junctures of
other drainages
D the most distant upstream center in the
system; a concentration point for goods
E and F the ultimate producers or collectors of the
products that are concentrated at D; they
may be centers in a different kind of non-
market exchange system involving goods
of which only part are involved in the A-
based system
X an overseas center that serves as the main
consumer of A’s exports and the main sup-
plier of its imports
A1 other coastal centers some distance away,
A2 dominating systems similar to A’s
Aside from these elements, this model also oper-
ates 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 1977:43–44).
In the case of LB Canaan, the first constraint is
applicable. New Kingdom Egypt to the south—and
even Ugarit to the north—was 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
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 het-
erogeneous set of resources (Finkelstein 1988; Ilan
1995:314; Marfoe 1979:9). Thus, while it was possi-
ble 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 cli-
mate, population growth, disease, or changes in other
aspects of the socioeconomy of the region continually
undermined the possibility of developing a true peas-
ant culture in Canaan. As a result, as Bronson’s
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.
443
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:
367–68) defined a three-tiered LB hierarchy of site
types consisting of walled cities, baronial estates, and
unfortified settlements. Ilan’s MB hierarchy con-
tained 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 (com-
mercial, ceremonial, administration, production);
secondary inland towns (administration, production,
transport); tertiary inland sites (ceremonial, produc-
tion, transport, storage); and mining sites, pottery-
producing villages, and agricultural support villages
(production, storage, transport) (Knapp 1997:56–61).
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 net-
works of production and exchange, but the relation-
ships among the sites in his model are no more well-
444 Michael Sugerman
defined than in other models that have been proposed
for Canaan. Knapp’s 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 capi-
tals. Knapp (1997:62) hints at the possibility of a
“king” overseeing the entire system, and of a govern-
ing 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 eco-
nomic models that assume coercive relations between
high- and low-order centers within a state-level sys-
tem, 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 net-
work 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 Leonard’s 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 ves-
sels). 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 Me-
giddo. 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 dis-
covered 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 Leonard’s 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, Ta«anach, Beth-shean, She-
chem, Gezer, Beth-shemesh, Lachish, and Tell Beit
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 part-
ners, it is the third segment of Leonard’s data that
best supports the argument that these secondary cen-
ters were using exotic goods to entice upstream in-
habitants 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 el-
Far«ah (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 Val-
ley (Leonard 1976:465).
Leonard’s 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 arti-
facts 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 dis-
tribution identified by Leonard runs counter to the
argument that symbols of wealth were amassed by
the rulers of urban city-states in shows of conspicu-
ous consumption (Bunimovitz 1995:326). A recent
comprehensive study of Mycenean pottery in the
Levant argues the opposite: in urban economic cen-
ters, 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
2002:109–24).
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 argu-
ment, 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. Utilitarian—or staple—goods 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
 Trade and Power in Late Bronze Age Canaan
a role as an item of trade; and (3) suitable for prove-
nience 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 re-
gions within Canaan. City-states are characterized as
having “a capital city…with an economically and
socially integrated adjacent hinterland” (Charlton and
Nichols 1997:1). The capital city thus accumulates
goods produced in a number of dependent settle-
ments—possibly 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 differ-
ences 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. Con-
versely, 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 Canaan-
ite jars from Deir el-Balaḥ, Lachish, Ashdod (south
shore), Tel Miqne-Ekron, Tel Batash, Tel Ta«anach,
Tel Nami, Tel Megadim, Tell Abu Hawam, Hazor,
and Tel Dan. This sample includes large urban inland
settlements, small inland settlements, large port cen-
445
ters and small coastal settlements. The political, eco-
nomic, 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 predic-
tions of the dendritic model (Sugerman 2000). In
each of the 273 samples of Canaanite jars that were
analyzed, the provenience of the sample was identi-
fied as either east of its archaeological findspot or—
in the case of some coastal sites—to 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 restrict-
ing the types of data used in one’s 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”
(Na»aman 1997:602), even though only a small num-
ber 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 set-
tlements must have been subordinate to the settle-
ments 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 impe-
rial Egypt during the New Kingdom and that the rul-
ers of the city-states were largely governing on behalf
of the pharaoh. Along with these documents, scholars
have suggested that Egyptian artifacts excavated in
Canaan—pottery, scarab seals, alabaster vessels, and
jewelry—are evidence for New Kingdom domination
or outright military occupation of the region
(Weinstein 1981:20–22). The presence of these high-
prestige Egyptian artifacts at a given site is often ar-
gued to be evidence for Egyptian governance (Bietak
1993; Dever 1985; Hoffmeier 1989:189). But the
evidence in support of this model of Egyptian politi-
cal 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.”
446 Michael Sugerman
The limitations and assumptions noted above have
made it difficult to model the political economy of
Canaanite society coherently, and have led archae-
ologists 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 investiga-
tions 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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