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A settlement-geology model for dolmen distribution in the Levant: revisiting the ‘great dolmen-field’ on the Irbid plateau

James Fraser,Kathleen Nicoll

Published 2025 in Levant

ABSTRACT

Early surveyors, including Schumacher and Glueck, described a vast dolmen field on the Irbid plateau, rivalling the size of the largest concentrations of dolmens elsewhere in the Levant. This area also features a dense cluster of mounded sites, suggesting that this was a well-occupied settlement landscape in the mid to late 4th millennium BCE. Yet our understanding of these settlement and funerary landscapes, and the relationships between them, is limited. The once-extensive dolmen field has been largely destroyed, and the only stratified sequences of late prehistoric occupation across the plateau come from two small soundings at Tell Irbid and Tell esh-Shi’ir. This paper compiles data from historical sources and presents the most complete picture for the distribution of dolmens west of Irbid. It then interrogates these data according to a ‘settlement-geology’ model that explains the distribution of dolmens by their proximity to Early Bronze I (EB I) settlement sites within specific geological domains. Finally, it considers the ‘great dolmen-field’ as a visible and enduring collective cemetery that exerted a centripetal force drawing the surrounding EBI communities together through the shared use of a contiguous mortuary landscape.

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