In foreign pastures: Livestock mobility at Hazor and the permeability of Iron Age geopolitical borders in the Southern Levant

Abstract

Southern Levantine societies during the Iron Age II (10th–8th centuries BCE) witnessed the formation of competing territorial polities and urban revival following a period of settlement ruralization and dwindling regional exchange economies associated with the collapse of Late Bronze Age Canaanite city-states around 1200 BCE. Recent work has revealed diverse expressions of complex political organization, state-sponsored cultic activity, and inter-polity conflicts within the region during the Iron Age II, but the impact of regular military confrontations and ensuing territorial reconfiguration on agro-pastoralist economic systems that supported these polities is unknown. Here we explore inter-polity border dynamics between the Israelite and Aramean states during periods of conflict (Iron Age IIA) and concord (Iron Age IIB) by establishing landscape-use strategies involving the most mobile element of Iron Age subsistence and production systems – domesticated sheep and goats, at Tel Hazor located in the Hula Valley, a place of direct contact between Aram and ancient Israel. Multi-stable isotopic analyses of bovid livestock teeth indicate agro-pastoralist herders grazed their animals in well-watered pastures locally near Hazor and also further afield in the Golan Heights. The continuous use of spatially diverse pasturing regimes throughout the Iron Age II suggests household-based agro-pastoralist land use transcended regional political discord. Everyday movement of herders and their flocks to distant pastures was not restricted despite conflict between the military and ruling elites of the Israelite and Aramean states, suggesting that borderlands between states were permeable.