Golanite Production and Distribution Center of Cooking Pots duringtheEarlyBronzeAgeII Yitzhak P AZ andMarkISERLIS INTRODUCTION TheGolanregionislocatedeastoftheseaofGalilee,anintegralpartoftheextensivehighlandthat continues into southern Syria, and generally part of a large volcanic region that stretches between southernTurkeyandsouthernYemen(Mor1995:103).Althoughunexploreduntil1968,theEarly Bronze Age constitutes one of the outstanding periods of settlement on the Golan. The emergency surveyin1968(EpsteinandGutmann1972),andespeciallythe‘LandofGeshur’project(Kochavi 1993),withinwhichanEBfortifiedsite(Leviah)wasexcavated,broughttolightbothamajorperiod of cultural florescence and the unique material culture of EB Golan. The large fortified centers on the Golan, more precisely in its south-central part, were the focal points of an urbanization process thatwasparalleltotheurbanizationthattookplacewesttotheGolan,buthadsomeuniqueattrib- utes that derived from, among other things, the relations between its inhabitants and the natural landscape(Paz2003). ThematerialculturetypicaloftheGolanduringtheEB,especiallyitsmiddlephase,theEBII(ca. 3050-2700 BCE), shows much similarity with the regions located east (the Hauran), south-east (the JordanValleyandGilead)andwest(theKinrotValley).Golanpotterytypesaregenerallyequivalent tothoseintheseareas.Thissaid,inrecentyearspotteryanalyseshavedemonstratedtypesuniqueto theGolan,and,furthermore,thattheyweremanufacturedandexportedfromtheGolanwestwards. Thosepotterytypesarenoneotherthanthemostmundanedailyvessels:cookingpotsthataretradi- tionallyassumedtobelocallymanufacturedbyhouseholdsoneachindividualsite.Morespecifically, themaincookingpottypeandthefocusofthispaperisthebrownholemouth, predominantinthe EB II. Bearing in mind that Northern Canaanite Metallic Ware was produced at the northernmost edgeoftheGolanandalsoexportedduringtheEBIIwestwardsinwhatseemstobeauniquecentral- izedsystem(Greenberg2002;GreenbergandPorat1996),themerepossibilitythatcookingpotswere also manufactured on the Golan and distributed to a distance has important implications for our understanding of the Golan within the urbanized landscape of the southern Levant during the EB, especiallytheEBII.(TheuseofGolanitecookingvesselswasalsocommonaftertheEB 1 ). Ingeneral,althoughrecentresearch(Milevski2005)hasdealtwithmanyaspectsofinter-regional contactswithinthesouthernLevant,ourunderstandingofrelationsbetweenfortifiedcentersofthe Golan and other regions has remained vague, mainly for lack of information concerning materials fromtheGolan.Wewillattempttoaddressthisissuehere. 1.AtTelHadar,locatedontheeasternshoresoftheseaofGalilee,GolanitecookingvesselswerepartoftheIronAgerepertoire(Shoval et al. 1991).