 Without further ado, I'd like to introduce our speaker today, Andrea Creel, who's a doctoral candidate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies. And Andrea naturally was one of the many students who came to take Anthropology 229A here in the department. She is distinguished, I think, as the only non-anthropology student from those cohorts to successfully apply for a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship. So although she's in Near Eastern Studies, I think we can count her as being an anthropologically sophisticated scholar. And I've had the great pleasure of being the outside member of her committee and seeing her develop the work that she's doing with the professor. So more spatial inter-between places in an area where most of the archaeology actually has traditionally looked at settlements. So I'm going to be bored to hearing more about the presentation of this. The final thing I should say is some of you may recognize Andrea because she also has taught in Anthropology to AC within Anthropology as a GSI, as currently a GSI in the cohort of the Anthropology GSI. Please welcome Andrea. So this talk is essentially based from my dissertation. And I had intended on it being a little bit more polished than it's ending up going to be. My idea was that the chapter from which I'm doing these case studies all on that I talk about in my abstract would be complete. And I would be kind of talking to you guys about what I came up with in that chapter and kind of maybe getting feedback from that. But I was sick throughout the entire month of September. And now I'm a little bit behind. So I'm going to still go through those case studies. But it's not quite as polished and as developed as I still like. It's still a little bit in that kind of preliminary developmental stages. I'm definitely one of those people who like things come to me as I write is how I work. So but the first part of this talk is based upon all the work I've already done in the dissertation and completed chapters. I have an introductory chapter where I talk in depth about methodology. And then I have another chapter where I talk about some of the textual sources that I'm drawing from. And then a third chapter where I'm talking about the long archaeological history of this landscape and what that has to do with some of the methodological concepts I'm talking about, especially womenality. And then in the chapter I'm currently working on is when I bring this into the particular time period of the Iron Age and start talking about how does what everything came before impact how we interpret or should be interpreting these sites at this certain time period. So with that in mind, I'm going to go ahead and start. This talk will be kind of partially me reading things and partially me just talking things out. I'm going to kind of switch back and forth. So to begin, to the untrained eye, the Sinai Negev in Southern Jordan may appear stark and empty, a vast, lifeless, unchanging horizon on the edge of nowhere. Indeed, communities in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean often perceive these lands and their inhabitants as peripheral and marginal, if not dangerous and barbaric. However, thousands of years of archaeological remains often still visible today, and that's a very important point, attest to quite another picture. This is a sedimented landscape, a palimpsest, where multiple communities inscribe themselves over the millennia. Many of these communities subsisted on a flexible patchwork of pastoralism, foraging, and limited agriculture, trade, and mining, framed within the punctuated and cyclical movements of pilgrimage. And so doing these communities actively drew on the visible past and movement through an arid landscape to constitute and cultivate their identities and an entangled connectivity with neighboring regions. In the Iron Age II, which is 1,000 to 600 BCE, the first part of the first millennium BCE, the rise of the Assyrian Empire both facilitated and constrained this connectivity. The Assyrians bounded and funneled the flows of people and material through this region in ways that foreshadowed the later empires of Rome, the early Islamic caliphates, and the Ottomans. However, local communities drew on the ancient meshworks of pilgrimage and the visible past to generate and foster new senses of self and ways of seeing in the midst of empire. So this talk, hopefully, analyzes the interaction of ritual movement and empire in the Iron Age as the confluence of multiple and overlapping senses of liminality unique to these lands. I suggest that both local and outsider communities, albeit in different ways, perceive these lands in terms of the potency of ambiguity and transitions. In the dry lands, this potency manifested as a distinct and complex interplay between movement and mobility, eridity, marginality, and betweenness. I utilize evidence of roadside ritual at Horvath Keepmeat in the Negev, in Kuntile de Jureud, and the Sinai as particularly pertinent case studies in understanding the complexities of ritual and multiple overlapping liminalities in the dry lands under the shadow of empire. So first, I wanna talk about these sites or just give a really quick background of the sites and where they are. So Kuntile de Jureud is way over here in what is today the North Eastern Sinai, the boundary line between the Negev and the Sinai is right along here. It's completely a modern political boundary. There's actually nothing there to say that that's actually a boundary. In the past, communities moved back and forth over this region, like it was no big deal. And Kuntile de Jureud was excavated in the mid-70s by a Tel Aviv university archaeologist of Mechel. This was during the actual occupation of the Sinai by Israel. He wrote up preliminary publications in the late 70s and early 80s. The material was eventually returned to Egypt in the mid-90s with a peace accord, but then it wasn't actually finally published until 2012. So I'm working with stuff that was excavated a while ago under some unclear circumstances and was only published fairly recently and the publication leaves something to be desired. So the site became famous though, kind of started the stir though because it has these references to Yahweh and to the seeming references and inscriptions to Yahweh and to a proposed consort, Asherah. And so often the site is discussed in terms of Israelite or Judean religion in politics and it's often identified as an Israelite or Judean fortress or way station. So the site dates to like the eighth century BCE and it's very interesting that it's often identified as Israelite or Judean because the Judeans would be up here. The Israelites would be even further up here. So my other site is Horvet Ketmet and it dates to a few decades later and it was discovered during survey linked to the excavation of Tel-Ira over here. They were surveying this whole land. It was also basically a survey in which they were doing because the military was moving out of the Sinai because of the peace accords and they had to survey all this area up here so that the military can move their bases up here. And so it was excavated in the mid-80s although a lot of stuff was collected from the site before there was actually any official excavations. And then it was finally published in 1995 and this particular site it's hailed as an Edomite Shrine in the Biblical Nagev. And for those of you who aren't familiar with those terms, Edom is generally used to refer to peoples who lived in the Iron Age in southern Jordan over here. And then this area here is often thought of as kind of this Judah client polity extended itself down into the northern Nagev. And then there's also lots of arguments about all the Edomites that came over here and they fought with each other and they established stuff over here. It's ridiculous. So as I was kind of already noting, there's problems with these interpretations having to do with the relationship to their surroundings and where peoples in their material cultures actually are but also having to do with the fact that the material cultures of these sites are highly idiosyncratic and often these ethnic identifications of the sites are based on a very small portion, whatever the authors of the site decided was important in order to attribute an ethnicity or a political identification to the site. So I think there's more to these sites though and then they as a result can, and because of the highly idiosyncratic nature of the sites in their context, so they can provide us with insights on liminality and connectivity and a host of other things in the southern Levant and just kind of in a broader sense in order to talk about other places as well. So I'm gonna start with my concept of, or not my concept, but the concept of liminality. So this concept has been around for a long time in academic literature. It was originally coined by Arnold von Genep in 1909 as the Rite of Passage in which he focused on rituals that mark the passage of an individual or social group from one status to another as particularly evocative and intense in the human experience. It's derived from the Latin word for threshold so it has this spatial metaphor going for it already although that's not really how it was used by von Genep. So liminality refers to a person placed thing or state of being that is betwixt in between, a transition, something that is neither here nor there, not easily categorized, miscellaneous in process. And furthermore, and this is something that people often don't talk about as I talk about liminality, is that according to von Genep there's something special, something powerful about being in this in between state because sacredness itself is a variable contextual and above all relational, something he called the pivoting of the sacred and he actually described it as these rotating circles, just kind of moving all around. So unfortunately von Genep's work received very little attention until its translation into English into 1960, ahead of his time. And once it was translated into English that's when Victor Turner comes in and he started to famously, he famously deployed the concept in several of his works in the 60s and the 70s. He's the one who started using the term betwixt in between and so on and so forth. So since then the term liminal has become ubiquitous across many disciplines as an explanatory mechanism for anything that doesn't fit. The word is often simply tossed around without explanation or elaboration. Really does anyone try to deconstruct or complicate our understanding of it? Now what I find interesting about the concept and you see it in this kind of notion of the pivoting of the sacred is that it is inherently about movement, the act, the process of transitioning and the power therein, the power of movement, whether that's movement in a physical, social, representative, et cetera, sense. So in Van Genef's work and in my dissertation, liminality is also intimately interrelated with religion and ritual. So I just wanted to go in really quickly how I'm kind of using these terms. A big fan of Thomas Tweed's definition of religion where he's using these languages of confluences and flows talk about it. They're religions as confluences of organic, cultural flows and intensified joy and confront suffering by drawing on human and superhuman forces to make homes and cross boundaries. And this is because Tweed is specifically interested in theory of religion that addresses three key themes, movement, relation and position, all of which are themes that I'm interested in and I think work really well with notions of liminality. And he emphasizes these two orienting categories of metaphors which are also relevant, the aquatic metaphors of confluences and flows to express that religions are not reified substances but complex processes. And the spatial metaphors of crossing and dwelling in order to index that religion is about finding a place and moving across space. So in this sense then, we can also think of ritual as movement, a process. And Catherine Bell kind of touched on this a little bit when she talked about ritualization or ritual as ritualization, a way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other usually more quotidian activities. So in this, Bell is drawing from Bordu's practice theory, adding sense of ritual to Bordu's list of the abstract senses of the socially informed body. So I also found some recent works by Carl Nappet and Tim Ingold, especially helpful. And this is these notions of networks and meshworks. Now networks have been around a lot in archeological and other kinds of literatures. But I was interested in how Nappet was deploying these notions of networks, especially when he talks about, when he really kind of emphasizes the nodes of networks and the links between the nodes. And he actually really goes into a more precise way of talking about networks that you will often see the kind of deployments in the literature. And he allows us to kind of think about physical and social connectivity simultaneously. But there's also been like a critique of networks. So like Ingold in an earlier work had, has already kind of talked about how the problem with networks is that it focuses on those nodes and not what's between the nodes. And he, you know, it comes from this notion of networks that originally was supposed to refer to actual nets. But then in this day and age is now being kind of more identified with like information technology and railways and communication networks. So the movement, so it's really emphasizing the nodes over what's going on between the nodes. And so Ingold wants to kind of go back to that. And he employs this notion of Neshwork. And in Neshwork in this model the lines and their entanglement are emphasized because the lines of the Neshwork are the trails along which life is lived. So Knappet in his work actually kind of noted this critique of networks. But he thinks that it allows, networks is still a useful object because it allows for interactions to be broken down into entities that we can then use for analysis. And he wants to use Neshworks as like, you know, that way you think about it in experience but networks is the way that you actually analyze it. So, but I kind of suggest that we don't need to, we don't need to oppose these two terms. I think we can understand them as two different ways attacking between, of understanding phenomenon. So the, the way that is we can think of them as the analysis of complex and intersecting phenomenon that requires a sense of flexibility, a deafness of methodological movement in which we may employ multiple models and perspectives on the same sets of archeological data. So the notion of Neshworks allows us to attend to phenomena as entangled movements. Well, Neshworks allows us to focus on certain nodes and clusters of nodes within the Neshwork that may be particularly visible at any given time and the relations that constitute them. And on that note, I think Manuel Vasquez has done some nice work where he's responding to Tweed's hydraulic model and he wants to bring in networks also to kind of, to work with hydraulic models as well because hydraulic models tend to be very anti-structuralist and kind of can run roughshod over details and particularities. And so Vasquez talks about how we can also think, we can also use networks to think about how movement is bounded, how it's constrained, how it's funneled, and thus in how one ways in which movement is power. So also in their discussions of connectivity, NAPIT and Engel do either, both also implicitly or explicitly draw on notions of place and landscape. These are notions that we also are already kind of familiar with in archeological phenomenologies of landscape. And in an earlier work, Engel defined landscape through what he called this dwelling perspective, which kind of goes along with this notion of a mesh work. That is the world as it is known to those who dwell therein who inhabit its places and journey along the paths connecting them. So then we know we can think of landscape as not just a physical environment, but it's something that involves all the bodily senses and it's something that we live within and it is a part of us and we are a part of it. So we're thinking about connectivity in terms of place and landscape and particular landscape in the Levant, which I am. Then we circle back to this notion of liminality. Despite the fact that liminality is derived from a spatial metaphor, Van Gena actually said very little about spatial liminality, but he does have this little section where he talks about neutral zones. These are the spaces between claim territories such as deserts, marshes and forests that he says are distinctively subject to the pivoting of the sacred and so are especially potent. On that note, I like to talk about the southern Levantine drylands, which here includes the Sinai, the Nagev, Southern Jordan and it also includes a lot of Northwestern Arabia as well. For my work on my dissertation in order to contain and eventually finish, I talk very little about Northwestern Arabia, though that's something I can definitely see because this area, people often don't think of it as going along with this stuff, but if we start thinking of it that way, it actually is gonna change a lot and as to how people are interpreting all of this material up here. I mean, there's some kind of work that's slowly being done about that right now, but in the past it's not been done. So I refer to this collectively as the southern Levantine drylands. These lands lie between Egypt, the Mediterranean and the Red Seas, Southern Arabia and the Southern Levant. Different things to different people. These lands have been home to indigenous, mobile, pastoralist communities. A source for special materials, copper and turquoise mines are in, you see there's a lot of turquoise, copper and turquoise mines down, especially in the southern Sinai, and then the Nagev, especially the southern Nagev, has a lot of copper mining going on and over here into part of southern Jordan as well. And then it's also a series of roads crisscrossing one another, connecting their surrounding areas, the paths that transport goods and people from one place to another. Finally, it's where gods live, where the divine is at hand. So these lands are marked as marginal and liminal by their neighboring regions, but more significantly though, the southern Levantine drylands take on an acutely nested sense of luminality by the virtue of the fact that they are the liminal spaces to other liminal spaces. The entire Levantine literal, which includes modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine and Jordan is located at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Beginning with some of its earliest communities and even into our present era, the Levant has been marked as a hub for trade, travel and military conquest. This was the place that people, objects and armies regularly traveled through to get to other places. Levant is the place in between in this part of the world. By the same token though, the Levant is also inherently a place of connectivity, a constant interaction of movement, which is also often distinctly visible in a material culture that definitely blends indigenous traditions with influences from across the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Very often when people are talking about what makes something Levantine, it ends up being like a hodgepodge of things that look like they come from other places. Okay, so the Southern Levantine drylands then, located in the southernmost portion of the Southern Levant, are the periphery of the periphery, which may lend itself to the notion that this land was seen as especially potent. Certain texts allude to this fantastic potency in the minds of neighboring communities. Egyptian texts often referred the drylands as the land of turquoise, over which Hathor presides and by the term Bia, which variously may mean mining country, remote treasures, wonders, metals, what the stars are made of, and it's often associated with omens and miracles. According to Assyrian and biblical sources, these lands are filled with fantastic and supernatural creatures, such as flying serpents and two-headed snakes, a notion that survives in the writings of Herodotus a little bit later. And in the Hebrew Bible, it is the place from which Yahweh comes and the place in which he engages in his most intimate encounters with humans. What these sources all have in common is that they often mythologize this landscape in a number of different and often contradictory ways. Often painting these lands as desolate, inhospitable, uninhabited, or filled with creatures, persons, and entities, both real and imagined, but always larger than life. Archaeological evidence also demonstrates a long history of human occupation in which small communities subsisted on goat sheep pastoralism, some agriculture, some foraging, the mining of these precious materials, copper and turquoise, and trade. How indigenous communities concede to this landscape is not accessible via text. They didn't leave us any text. But we can see how much the land played into their sense of ritual by the dense scatter of open-air ritual sites constructed largely within the 6th to 3rd millennia BCE. With often with evidence for continued use or reuse in later periods going on up into the Islamic periods as well. These sites include what we call standing stone sites. These are single or groups of standing stones and they're just kind of worked or semi unworked stones. They usually don't have anything else on them. They're just stones set vertically on the ground. And they might be associated with offering tables, altars, and basins. We also have these open courtyards of single course field stones that are associated with similar installations. And we also have a lot of these geoglyphs. They're circles, lines, and often also these zoomorphic creatures. And they come in various sizes and various creatures can be shown in them. And then the other big thing that we have are tombs. And there's generally two main types of tombs. You have this kind of tumulus style of tombs where there's like a little cyst burial in there and then they kind of laid these flat rocks over them in a mound. And then you have these ones called Nawamis. And these are circular, are beehive shaped rock structures with corbelled arch ceilings. And then there's a lot of tombs that are kind of somewhere in between these two as well. But the point is that all of this stuff is visible and it remains visible on the landscape for up until today. And so as more and more of these sites are constructed and remain visible, even after their abandonment, they interacted recursively with notions about the land to create an ever-increasing sense of potency to the landscape. And one way in which they create this potency is their relationship to these indigenous, mobile pastoral communities. Recently, Joy McCourston wrote a book about pilgrimage amongst mobile pastoral communities in Arabia and keeping in mind that a lot, we have this movement, a lot of these communities that are in Arabia, they're moving up to the Sinai, then the Gev and Southern Jordan as well. They're kind of moving back and forth and shifting over time. And they have a lot of the same materials in Arabia. And McCourston kind of defines these as kind of a landscape of pilgrimage. And that you have these mobile pastoral communities, they're doing their thing, being mobile, being pastoral. And they're moving to different places along the landscape and kind of proclaiming swaths of territory in their movement. Their movement is their form of stating that this is our territory and our land. And they generally, and they often set up, and you know, they have these stops a long way, places where they camp out. And these stops are often associated with water sources. And there's often ritual sites associated with them. And it's the same time these guys are moving because they're moving with the herds and they're moving for subsistence reasons. It's also conflated with ritual and with moving from one holy site to another. And McCourston refers to this as a pilgrimage-making society. Unlike people in Mesopotamia who live in houses, and what she calls like a house-making society, these mobile pastoralist communities make pilgrimage. And that is how they constitute their identity and the land around them. So this landscape that's just scattered with ritual is added to by the Egyptians as well because they are routinely making expeditions into the dry lands in order to mine copper and turquoise in the third and second millennia, mostly in the southern Sinai. In the process, they frequently interact with indigenous communities and they mark this landscape with relief statues and architecture dedicated to their gods. The most elaborate example being the one I'm showing here of a temple to Hathor at Sarabet El Kadim in the southern Sinai that was in operation throughout most of the second millennium. So in all this, there is yet another set of nesting liminalities to consider that has been kind of heavily implied to up until this point and that is of roadways and crossroads within a marginal landscape. Roads are another liminal geography as they both join and divide landscapes and places and crossroads are no inherently betwixt to between spaces. And the recent edited volume on roads on the broader Sahara Arabian desert, Reimer and Forrester have discussed desert roads as both intricate networks, capillaries, that allow the passage of people, goods, and communication, and as embedded linear structures, an integral part of the physical landscape, both shaping and shaped by the land. I also kind of bring in Edward Casey's work here and he talks about the body in the landscape as both an interplace and an intraplace. And I think that we can think of roads in kind of a similar way. They have a similar relationship to the landscape as the body does. They're intraplaces and they're places within places and they're interplaces, the places between places. So thus we can think of roads as places that are increasingly inscribed over time with their own specific set of features, animal and wheel tracks, provision depots, and various types of road markers, including stelae and petroglyphs. These features also inscribe the landscape, adding to its potency and allowing for those journeying along the roads to imagine the travelers and perhaps the supernatural entities who came before them. So by the time the Iron Age rolls around, that's early 1st millennium BC, this already marginal and liminal landscape is literally littered with past evidence of various kinds of human activity. Much of it originally a ritual in nature, and much of which by this point might have had its origins shrouded in mystery and maybe looked different, strange, and otherworldly, creating a distinctive atmosphere steeped in memory and magic. Then in the Iron Age, we see some new things that are increasingly integrate the drylands into the ancient Near East, even as they ultimately remain marginal to the area. And that is... So we have the large-scale expansion of the copper mining industry. The domestication of the camel and the adoption of the tent by mobile pastoralist communities. This really increases the distances that mobile pastoralist communities can travel and contributes to the rise of the Arabian incense trade. They both traded up directly into the Assyrians, but it's also thought that they traded up towards the Mediterranean as well. And then, and of course, this also brings us to the increasing hegemony of the Assyrian Empire. So the effect of these is to increase the flow of goods and people through the drylands in the interactions of indigenous communities with non-indigenous communities. Yet this increased interaction may only have served to further exoticize this landscape and all that it contains, thus increasing its ritual potency. I suggest then that we might reinterpret the materials that Contilledez-Rood and Karnat keep meet then within the context of this ancient, sedimented potent landscape in its communities, that we may envision these sites at the intersection of multiple overlapping and conflicting communities, and as nodes through which materials, communities, and power were funneled. Furthermore, I suggest these sites also index, or may also index, how local communities fostered new senses of self and ways of seeing in the midst of an ever encroaching empire. Both Contilledez-Rood and Karnat keep meet are single-period ritual sites located on road sites and the intersections of crossroads in an arid landscape visibly marked by ritual in the past. Thus, the ritual activities of these sites would have drawn on quite the assortment of overlapping and nesting liminalities interacting recursively with each other, the land, and the people within the land. However, it should also be known that each of these sites would have expressed these nesting liminalities in their own distinctive manner, in their own distinctive manner, which is derived in part from their specific geographic and temporal context within this landscape. So I don't know if I'll be able to really get into both sites, but we'll talk first about Contilledez-Rood, which Contilledez-Rood lies on an isolated plateau in the north-eastern Sinai with no sedentary settlements anywhere nearby. The closest one is 50 kilometers away and may or may not have been occupied at the same time as Contilledez-Rood. This is an area of the Sinai where there's usually less mobile pastoral activities, but there is evidence of it although the survey data is not incredibly great. Interpretation of the site has been fraught and varied as I kind of alluded to earlier, but it's a position on the roadside next to a series of natural wells. Likely indexes the site service as a place of rest for those traveling along the road. However, the site is distinct in its architecture and material culture. First off, you'll note that it doesn't look like anything else that I've talked about so far. Many of the things that are going on at this site kind of are suggesting that there's something new, there's something different happening here, and also in that ritual played in an important role in the construction and maintenance of the site. And this partially has to do with when we walk into the excavator of the site kind of separated the site up into a building A and a building B. Building A is an actual building. Building B is a series of features and semi-eroded rooms and things that actually, until the final publication came out, nobody even knew what this area looked like even though it's probably actually the most important part of the site. And so this actually functioned as the entryway into the site. So I want you to imagine for like 30 or 40 years, everyone knew of this building and no one knew what this looked like. Knowing that this is here and what's in here, I think kind of dramatically changes or should have changed how people interpreted the site. So as you can, so there's this, you have this series of buildings and things on either side of what is a mud plastered pathway. And this thing here is really interesting because it's, in the literature, they often refer to it as a bomba. It's this big, giant, rectangular thing made of rocks. And generally in the Southern Levant, this is a site of ritual. This is where some sacrifices or offerings were made on top of these things. So it's likely that this is where, anyone who was visiting the site, that this is where rituals were actually performed and witnessed by the visitors. And as such, this area funneled and constrained movement into and through the rest of the site. Building A is interesting then. People kind of always often assumed that, because they didn't really know well it was here, that people kind of walked up here and then they hung out here because you have this entryway here that is covered in plaster and these benches. So these benches, there's line up around here, everything, the walls, the floor, the benches are all covered in plaster. This area is too, this is all plastered, this is plastered, this is plastered. There's paints, there's the remains of paintings along the walls. There's inscriptions appearing on doors. And what's interesting about this site is that it has this kind of, this building here is that it has this kind of fortress-like appearance to it. But it's not actually, it's not made very well, it couldn't actually ever sustain any sort of military attack. And then another thing that's interesting about this here is that this very much has the appearance of a city gate. The way that this is walked through and with this bent-axis approach as well. And then just to show you really quickly, so this is it comparing it to the other site that's 50 kilometers away that was a fortress. This is what it looks like. It may or may not have been actually active at the time of Contilla-Age-Rood, but if it wasn't, it's likely that this layout was at least visible to the people who built Contilla-Age-Rood. And here I'm showing you very bad photo of that plaster-lined bench room area. So Contilla-Age-Rood features a number of artifacts. Many of them are just simple utilitarian vessels. But the vessels are all, especially the small vessels, are all concentrated in that entry room and in these two little tower rooms that were connected to it. And you also have this gigantic, I think it was like 200 kilograms stone bowl. It's got a blessing on it. You've got these giant pithoi and the walls, which are also, which are covered with all sorts of inscriptions and images. And both of which are often invoking notions of fertility, life, birth, continuity, rhythm, music, dancing, and divine and royal power. So I'm just showing you to like run through these two up. So these, and these two large pithoi, one of them was in the bench room and the other one was just inside in the courtyard area. And it's thought that they might have both originally stood in the bench room. And then this is the other, the other very large pithos. So this site has confused people who work in the Southern Levant for several decades and continues to confuse people. But I suggest that many of the things that we find confusing about the site make sense in light of its specific context within this landscape. So just north of the site, though it's unclear where, the excavator of the site noted that there's these very visible geoglyphs near the site. And there's also a campsite over here. The relationship of the campsite to the rest of the building is unclear. But I, this kind of made, given everything that I've been telling you about the landscape and people kind of revisiting sites, and especially given that this was a site with natural water, was a natural water source. And in a part of the Sinai where there's, you can go hard-pressed to find water. I think we should consider this site within the landscape of pilgrimage associated with sources of water. That as a source, water source can tell you, yes, would have sort of a sanctuary for weary travelers, a welcome respite from the harsh conditions of the drylands. And as an opportunity to thank the gods for a safe journey thus far and request continued protection the rest of the journey. And that the site is currently dated to the early 8th century BCE. And this is interesting, this is interesting because this is before the Assyrians are encroaching on the continent, southern Levant, but they haven't made any direct inroads into the drylands. But they have affected everybody north, and they have moved, started to shift trade networks more intensely through the drylands. So I think that we can see this as this, so I think this plays into this increasing interaction in trade and we can, might be able to think of this site as local mobile pastoralist communities, kind of innovating, mimicking, kind of dealing with the pressures that they're feeling in the new opportunities there are arising and also kind of responding to the increased interaction that they're having with these other communities. And this will kind of fall in so recently Israel Finkelstein, an archaeologist commented that the, it's interesting that the abandonment of the site coincides, it's really unclear like why the site was abandoned. So it's interesting that the site was abandoned around the same time that the Assyrians do move directly into the drylands and it looks like the Assyrians moved the main trade route and like shifted it through the northern and the Gav. So the abandonment of the site would coincide with the Assyrians making that move in the region. So I'm not really going to talk too much about Horvath Keepme, except to say then it becomes then a nice way for me to compare with Contilla, to Contilla-Azureot and talk about because Keepme is a few decades later after the Assyrians have kind of made their impression and their movement into the drylands and but also they're using, but the Assyrians aren't like the Romans or other, they don't like hang out and like make people do things. They usually, they use proxies and in the northern again, they were using the local client, the local client polity of Judah up to the north. So this area becomes in as often similar to this area in previous time periods because it's a highly interactive space. This is an area where you can do agriculture. It's semi-arid. You can, you have actual settlements. You can build some very nice villages. And so this area becomes a huge contact zone between mobile pastoralist communities and sedentary populations. And you have sedentary communities that are kind of flowing down in here as well. And you have mobile pastoralist communities that are, they're kind of doing a semi-pastoral, semi- sedentary kind of thing as well, whatever that means. And the site is interesting. And so this site, so this site is interesting then because unlike Kuntala Rajrod, it's very close to a lot of things. It's only like an hour's walk from the site of Tel Wahata. And it is visible from several other sites. The site is also interesting in that. So it's got a standing stone, little installation going on right here. They're a lot, a ring near the site. You see there's visible cairns and tumuli. And so very likely this site, it becomes this site of highly interactive space between the communities of the Northern Nagev, especially at Tel Wahata. And so that the ritual practitioners at the Fort Vatkeet, any of you that lived at Tel Wahata sometimes, and it's kind of, they're intimately kind of bound up with each other. And just to show you how, you can really see this in the material culture. These are a couple of items that are from Fort Vatkeet Meet. This is a guy who's from Tel Wahata. And there's also a relationship between the site and another site in the Eastern Nagev, showing that there's kind of a flow of material, showing this flow of materials and communities and people and now in this east-west direction that wasn't quite as evident during the 8th century BCE. So those are, that's kind of still what I'm working on and trying to put together. Like I said, I was hoping I'd have a nice, grand, big conclusion to give you and something really snazzy to say, but that's kind of essentially where I'm at right now. That's okay. I had a question just about roads and roadways. Is there some way to see, like, ancient road paths? Is that visible here on the ground? So when it comes to the Nagev and Sinai, people have it really map the roads. Well, they're starting to, basically depending upon which area you're in. And so a lot of times, those lines in the map that people are drawing for you, they're just like, well, there's a site here and a site here, so there's probably a road between them. There's only, there's just a very little work to it. Where are the apps? So I know there's a lot of, like, corona imagery in Iraq that shows it can show those paths, sort of, but I don't know if there's something like that. Yeah, yeah, that's something I was going to try to look into, but may not look into before I finish. I mean, considering another project. Yeah, I was just wondering if there's any, for direct evidence that these Iron Age people were somehow engaging with the early Bronze Age, Calculasic, standing structure that you're talking about. You find, you find later materials at these sites. So you already do? Yes, yes, yeah. So that's your basic idea, that this is a sediment of the landscape and that it becomes more and more powerful is that the Iron Age people are aware of all the earlier things and think of that as a particular kind of space, different than surrounding states. Yeah, so all the time when people talk about the Iron Age, they either, they don't really explicitly bring up the materials that come before. They kind of act like this was an empty landscape who came along in the Iron Age and built up some new things and they never noticed or looked at anything else that was already in the landscape. But I, because I'm a little bit in the other parts of the robot, things actually do get very, so you, the landscape is changing but it may not be as obvious to you as what was going on before. With this landscape, the sun is just out there, it's sitting there. And I can only to look at these materials in the context of, if we're looking at these materials and thinking about them, then people in the past were also doing that. And that made it played into their sense of the landscape and why they built things the way they did then they did. Thank you very much. So if I could follow along with Kathy and I realize that when we have the pictures you got first, but your Iron Age sites that we spent time on is fascinating and you said it's near holes of water and wells, wells dug by people. They're natural wells. So they're holes in the ground with water bubbling up. Let's start. Okay, so and clearly people given the region must have known very much about that. So do you have these polymcestic at least earlier edifices or two of those around those wells? Meaning you're just showing us the Iron Age site. I'm assuming if you just zeroed in on the kilometer around the wells, how would you have your path? What would you have? Yeah. I mean, I'm not even saying this to you. Are you finding a whole range of earlier structures or archaeological remains in that area? So really this Iron Age structure is a long line of sequence of people spending time there. So if that's the case, why is this, I mean, why is this so different? Or is it the influence structure of your big structure coming in a way you were suggesting that it's like a fort an ethereal fort? Yeah. It looks like a fort. Like other minis. Forts from the greater region, which I don't know. Probably from some bigger region. Some people are going there spending enough time while they fill that. But what about your ritual side of this discussion? These funny objects that you've unknown and get something in that that you're now knowing about? How do those link to your earlier polymcestic rituals and where are they getting their ideas? The inner nature of your part, that is that from the neighboring polymcester? I mean, what's the memory of being played out in your architecture? So that's something I'm trying to work through here now and with what's happening in the Iron Age. I think that there's been these long traditions in which they're interacting, sometimes they kind of inherit your traditions or they're creating new traditions about the space and what's going on there. And they, let's see how it does. I think that they're kind of bringing in different strands from both what was kind of already there in the landscape and these new interactions that they're having. So they have this long tradition of kind of these open-air ritual sites and then it's very interesting to then build something that kind of looks like a fort. And then the reason why that's interesting is because in the southern lawns, there is a long history of ritual spaces that look like fortress architecture. There's an interaction right out there, bringing in notions of power for stage protection and how to do it with ritual. So it seems to me that they are intentionally calling in these kind of different aspects that they are encountering both in their, in both any tradition that were already there and in things that have been have flowed in from other places. Well, it's lurky, really. Yeah. I mean, we have a series of different architectural existences across that landscape. And some are clustered and some are not. And it's very difficult, at least some clustering around this very important location. One, because it's longer and two, it's on road and they're calling it deep and there. So it's going to be a key location. So lots of people are going to be passing through there. So the question is, what was it about those styles of materialization, if you will, that made them do what they did? I mean, we've got, you mentioned fortresses. What about these other weird structures that you seem to be alluding or sort of the core of the deep religion, the deeper, meaningful landscape of religion? That's close, of course. Because that's the way I heard you speak. I mean, if I missed that, I mean, what's it about that cluster of structures? Do you think that that's a new manifestation of ritual architecture marking the women's game? Or playing off of what's around there? What do you think about this? The earlier materials, you had two structures here, A and B, the bits you said, oh, it was on the map, so you were learning about it. Yeah. And you seem to allude that that was the core, that was the sacred, sacred place of worship, more of a ritual, which would suggest that it had some kind of manifestation that has more meaning. Keep meaning. So I guess I'm trying to ask about that, and how that points, how does that link into this warrior landscape? History, both memory or... Yeah. So this is something that I'm trying to work through with the site. And like I said, I intended to have it more done for now, and that is that there's kind of these processes. There's this site of strange, there's one thing that's inside of strange, but there's also issues of what we can do with a lot of erosion that's been doing at the site. So that front area seems to be where there were certain rituals going on, and then going back into the building A area seems to be where there were kind of a different set of rituals going on, and perhaps some ritual storage happening as well. And I would really like, and I wish this site had been excavated and published in such a way, that I could talk about the site more in the context of relating those specific materials to what is in and around the site, to those older, those geoglyphs, like they tell you exactly where those geoglyphs are. We just, Mechel just writes that, you know, they're visible from the mountaintop. And there's been very little kind of survey work done in that area, especially if that's like, this art that's actually being published in ways. So this is kind of what I am trying to kind of struggle through now with this particular site is, and it's definitely, yeah, sort of. I'll read to your memory. Just follow up on this. I mean, because I think this is actually, it's been absolutely understanding that you're working through it right now, but what you're telling us is that people had to come through that more ambiguous architectural complex to come up to the big building, which was the only thing that people knew about. And that complex of features has at least one feature that is the kind of thing you'd find out away from sites, right? The place of ritual, the one that you said looked like, I can't remember the number. Like a mountain rock. Yeah, the branches like it. So that's the kind of thing that I normally would build somewhere without all the architecture. Right? You want to try to gather it? Get a temple, boy. We're not going to win. In an individual 11 team complex, it actually gets to the sites for where it's at. So yeah, it has to do with, yeah, because it's in the front area and you're working your way through, like if you had a typical 11 team temple, you kind of like the temple, which very often people who weren't a priest could go inside and get all this ritual happening in the courtyard in front of the temple. So this actually, in that sense, is structurally creating that space of, again, your liminality concept is very useful here because it's a liminal space within a liminal landscape within a liminal way of being with respect to everything that came before. Right? That's what you're trying to do. We can talk about that in the back. So that it becomes a very powerful place because of those different registers of liminality, even though the preserved features are relatively modest, you know that that's the sort of resident center, like that's for most people. And then for me, what's interesting is the contrast between that and the very formalized and very explicitly labeled, you know, they think they're running on the jars and on the walls and there's no way you can miss the message in the other part. There's a specific religious contact there that you're being forced to engage with, which is different than the other part, right? The other part actually works more with sacredness as a general act, right? Yeah, yeah. Earlier too, earlier, working back more early, you had the importance of being the right person of that front stuff, like the parking lot, and then you get the familiar times just for this, which is higher age. In here, in here. And also, so I think one of the reasons is that this site has perplexed people because I think in, when I'm showing you guys that there's evidence that there was ritual happening here, but this site also lacks certain evidence of ritual that we expect to see in your typical 11th-year context. And so this is why people have often argued over whether or not to identify the site as a ritual site and how you categorize it then. And in my analysis, what I'm trying to do here is demonstrate that that lack of materials is a choice that's being made in the context of the landscape in which those materials, because those materials don't appear at ritual sites in the site I'm going to get in this previous millennia. So I see that as this is a site where people are making choices based upon traditions that are already there and bringing in and interacting with these other notions that are coming to them. Yeah, so that's basically exactly what we were doing. We were doing it, you were doing it. Sorry, that's very little sweet. That's very interesting stuff. Yes. So there are other questions, but if not maybe or maybe you want to come and actually talk directly down here, but I think we should answer first. Yeah. So if you have interesting material and if you think anything about how this is interesting. Yes. Yeah, I...