Complex Communities: The Archaeology of Early Iron Age West-Central Jordan

5. Managing Community

104 What was the nature of leadership in Early Iron Age west-central Jordan? What role did wealth play in constituting this authority? Did the presence of leaders contribute to the communities’ resilience or did it destabilize it? Were there limits to leaders’ authority? This chapter will investigate these and other questions that pertain to the emergence of authority and inequality in the region’s communities. Asking questions about small-scale societies such as those considered in this work returns the discussion to issues raised earlier, namely how societies moved between egalitarian and hierarchical relations over time, a feature of communal complexity. Determining whether these shifts occurred and explaining how they arose requires sensitivity to the micropolitics of everyday life in specific communities . Power and authority would not necessarily have been expressed in the discursive signatures which most discussions of ancient Near Eastern leadership depend on for evidence, such as monumental architecture and spectacular visual culture (Heinz and Feldman 2007). Rather, they could have been manifest in more subtle arrangements, the position and size of buildings, the circulation of food, and the willingness to cooperate in shared production activities. Nor should one expect leadership to emerge for the same reasons or unfold along the same trajectories in each instance . As Smith and Choi (2007) discovered in their simulations of leadership in small-scale societies, elites can emerge through unequal patron-client-like relationships that exploit inequalities between members. Alternatively, they can arise in moments when societies are most in need of guidance to manage resources and labor. Altogether, then, the nature of Chapter Five Managing Community Managing Community · 105 leadership, authority, and inequality cannot be merely assumed in Early Iron Age communities, as has often been the case in prior research (see the following discussion). Rather, it must be investigated in each instance using whatever materials are available. Strategies of Authority in the Early Iron Age Levant Most discussions of leadership and authority in Early Iron Age Levantine societies have focused on the political organization of early ancient Israel, combining the biblical narrative and the archaeological record of the central highland settlements, where the narrative places ancient Israel’s development in the twelfth and eleventh centuries BCE. Scholars have been largely divided over such reconstructions, although their interpretations are nevertheless instructive for understanding what possibilities might exist. The oldest and most persistent interpretation is that early Israelite society exhibited an egalitarian, nearly acephalous, social structure characterized as a corporate personality that made no distinction between persons and the broader community in which they participated (Faust 2006:92–107; Johnson 1961, 1964; Robinson 1964).1 Rather, individuals were bound within a kind of “psychic unity” where personal identities were projected onto the larger social collective. In turn, the social collective was projected onto the person. Moments in the biblical narrative illustrate this corporate personality in passages describing the covenant ceremonies between the Israelites and Yahweh; two examples are Levirate marriage obligations—where the wife of a deceased man marries her brother-in-law and names her firstborn son after her deceased husband—and collective punishment for the crimes of the individual or the few (e.g., Deuteronomy 13:12; Joshua 7:25–26; 2 Samuel 21:5–6).2 Despite this interpretation, it is difficult to ignore evidence for leadership in the written and, especially, the physical evidence. Some have drawn on social evolutionary categories to make sense of this evidence in ways that are similar to scholars described earlier who investigate early Moabite political organization (e.g., Dearman 1992; Mattingly 1992; Miller 1992). The biblical narrative’s description of ancient Israel’s development fits nicely with social evolutionary frameworks, after all. The narrative describes how Israelite society moved through increasingly complex stages of political organization.3 Scholars have used the category of chiefdom to describe early Israel’s political arrangements during the period between the Exodus and the Israelite polities. Chiefdoms exhibit economic, social, and political 106 · Managing Community organization beyond that of tribe societies, but less than that of state societies . Ethnographic attestations of chiefdom societies indicate that leaders often base their authority on charisma, wealth, and tradition in order to manage subsistence practices and the distribution of materials and prestige items (Earle 1987:292–297; Rothman 1994). Such characterizations are reflected in the biblical narrative’s description of the exploits of ancient Israel’s earliest kings such as Saul and David who sought political power through...