Household and Death. Commodification and Identities in Baja during the Late Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (LPPNB) of the Southern Levant

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Dominik Bonatz
• Subject Area: Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393531712

The transition to sedentary and productive life triggered fundamental changes in relationships between individuals, groups, things, spaces, and the cognitive dispositions and identities behind them, determining their interaction spheres. Built space, claimed tangible and intangible territories as well as the enhanced commodification (of ideas, knowledge, work, and things) became constitutive and decisive in an unprecedented way for early sedentary communities. The early Neolithic mega-villages of the Near East represent extraordinary archives for studying these productive transformation processes, in order to understand the historical relevance of the social and cognitive spheres which developed in their various environments. In particular, the state of research of the well-known mega-sites of the eastern Jordanian mountain ranges (2nd half of the 8th millennium BCE) must be considered an extraordinary empirical database for such investigations. The already available extensive data from Baja and Basta and the results of the feasibility study carried out in autumn 2016 in Baja for a research focus Household and Death. Processes of Social Commodification and Identities in the Late PPNB of the Southern Levant ensure the great potential for this research. Recent fieldwork allowed to identify an intramural cemetery in Baja, and confirmed the existence and location of intentionally buried household inventories aside the active households. The relation of households and sepulchral spheres played an important role in the establishment of early Neolithic life modes and value systems. Approaching by the concepts and results of Household and Death in Baja, the project heads for an integral/ holistic answer for the research questions, asked from a southern Levantine perspective: Which social and ideological roles did the dead under the house floors play, were daily practices separated from their ritual sphere? Through which types of organization were identities of value and commodity communities established? Which interrelated processes fostered the success of the productive life ways, and do their characteristic acceleration and agglomeration processes explain later historic developments? Can the productive, social, and economic core groups be identified through built entities? Is it possible to apply the concept of familial relationship in order to understand early social organizations? Is it sensible to consider household production entities only from the perspective of subsistence and procurement? Consisted early sedentary communities of corporately linked groups? Our project approaches the topic from the interior and holistic: It evaluates the neolithisation by the findings of a small Neolithic community and how it participated in the general Neolithic trajectory. It is aiming at a deep historical understanding of the Neolithic ethos which became the substratum of the productive lifeways of following times.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants