ASU Research E-Magazine: Garbage Shines Like Gold When Digging for History

History seldom arrives on a silver platter. Some days you dig it up.

While excavating the Canaanite farming village of Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj (Arabic for “Mound of the Father of Ewes”) in the Jordan Valley, members of an ASU winter field school uncovered clues that may help explain the origins of ancient civilization.

“If you’re looking for the foundation of society, it might be found more readily in the countryside than in the city,” says Steven Falconer, associate professor of anthropology.

The 4,000-year-old historical clues the team dug up did not come from crumbly tablets or solid-gold statuettes. They came from something less dazzling but no less meaningful.

Garbage.

Almost a ton and a half of artifacts were shipped back to ASU for analysis. The pile of stuff consists mostly of animal bones, broken pottery, fragments of stone tools, and plant remains such as burned seeds.

“All this material is basically Bronze Age garbage,” Falconer says. “But this garbage is very eloquent. It tells us something about the foods these people ate, the products they manufactured, and the way they used the landscape around the site. So we try to assemble this fairly unglamorous data to talk about everyday life. That’s our goal.”

So far, the researchers have found some surprising results.

Located in northern Jordan near the Israel border, Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj offers archaeologists a rare glimpse of rural life at a time of urban abandonment. Falconer and Fall explored the site briefly in the 1980s while excavating the nearby village of Tell el-Hayyat (“Mound of the Snakes”), which flourished later during an urban heyday.

The purpose of the field school was to gather data to compare and contrast the sites, Falconer says. Members expected to see a tale of two villages.

Instead, they discovered that the communities shared much in common. For example, very few bones of wild animals were found at either site, suggesting that the inhabitants were dedicated farmers at both places and times. Plant and animal remains also corresponded.

“The similarities between the two sites have led us to argue that there’s a resilient element of rural village life that persists whether there are cities or not,” Falconer says. “This suggests that in some parts of the world perhaps cities don’t figure quite so crucially in the life of everyday people as they do elsewhere.”

More than 500 people lived at Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj from 2300 to 2000 B.C. “They’re the Canaanites you read about in the Old Testament,” Falconer adds.

What are the ultimate implications of snooping through these mounds of garbage?

“I like to think that we’re able to illuminate this part of ancient civilization that otherwise we wouldn’t know much about,” Falconer said. —Erik Ellis