The Temple and the Town at Early Bronze Age I Megiddo: Faunal Evidence for the Emergence of Complexity LIDAR SAPIR-HEN,DEIRDRE N. FULTON,MATTHEW J. ADAMS, AND ISRAEL FINKELSTEIN The Early Bronze Age is considered to be the period when complex and hierarchical societies first developed in the southern Levant. The appearance of specialization and social complexity is manifested through different aspects of the production stages of animal economy. In this paper, we examine faunal assemblages from two interconnected contemporaneous neighboring sites of differing characters in the Jezreel Valley, Israel: Megiddo, a cult site, and Tel Megiddo East, a town site. Both assemblages are dated to the Early Bronze Age IB (EB IB; 3090–2950 B.C.E.), at the dawn of urbanization in the Near East. The connection between sites, revealed in previous studies of other aspects, is supported by the analysis of fau- nal remains that reveals intriguing overlaps and divergences. The results of the current study show that the control of resources by the Great Temple in Megiddo also included access to animals and their prod- ucts, and that it impacted the animal economy in settlements in its hinterland. The impact of this system demonstrates the Great Temple at the center of a larger regional economic organization in the late EB IB that would presage the urban developments of the EB II–III. Keywords: Early Bronze; animal economy; social complexity; Megiddo; Tel Megiddo East; faunal remains T he late 4th and early 3rd millennium B.C.E. is con- sidered to be the period when complex and hierar- chical societies first developed in the Near East (Joffe 1991; Stein 1998; Algaze 2001). In the southern Le- vant, this major change in human social evolution is attrib- uted to the Early Bronze (EB) Age (ca. 3800–2500 B.C.E.). Within the EB, the EB II–III has been understood as the period defined by the emergence of urbanism, while the preceding EB I was marked by slow growth of small villages into larger settlements (Greenberg 2002, 2019). The EB I is further divided to the EB IA and EB IB, the latter setting the conditions for the growth of urban centers in the following period. This is evident in the large size of many sites and the presence of public architecture and fortifications at sev- eral sites already in the EB IB, which some take as signs of urbanism (Adams, Finkelstein, and Ussishkin 2014; Mi- roschedji 2014; Richard 2014; Greenberg 2019). Despite ongoing debate about the meaning of “urbanism” and its application to societies of the EB southern Levant, there is consensus that the EB IB was a period of increased social complexity. The development of social complexity is innately sup- ported by the division of labor and elongated chains of pro- duction. Considering animal economy, the appearance of specialization in different aspects of the production stages during the late 4th and early 3rd millennium B.C.E. was dem- onstrated in Mesopotamia (Zeder 1991, 1994) and central Lidar Sapir-Hen: Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures, Tel Aviv University, P. O. Box 39040, Tel Aviv 6997801, Israel; lidarsap@tauex.tau.ac.il Deirdre N. Fulton: Department of Religion, Baylor Univer- sity, One Bear Place #97284, Waco, TX 76798-7284, United States of America; Deirdre_fulton@baylor.edu Matthew J. Adams: W. F. Albright Institute of Archaeological Research, 26 Salah ad Din, Jerusalem 9711049, Israel; mja198@gmail.com Israel Finkelstein: School of Archaeology and Maritime Cul- tures, University of Haifa, 199 Aba Khoushy Avenue, Mount Carmel, Haifa 3498838, Israel; ifinkel1@univ.haifa.ac.il Electronically Published February 15, 2022. Bulletin of ASOR, volume 387, May 2022. © 2022 American Society of Overseas Research. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for ASOR. https://doi.org/10.1086/718777