Ground-penetrating radar investigations at Marj Rabba, a Chalcolithic site in the lower Galilee of Israel Thomas M. Urban a, * , Yorke M. Rowan b , Morag M. Kersel c a Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art, University of Oxford, Dyson Perrins Building, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK b University of Chicago, United States c DePaul University, United States article info Article history: Received 18 November 2013 Received in revised form 5 February 2014 Accepted 2 March 2014 Available online 16 March 2014 Keywords: Ground-penetrating radar Israel Chalcolithic Terra rossa Levant Geophysics abstract The Chalcolithic site of Marj Rabba, in the lower Galilee of Israel, features shallow limestone structures situated in a terra rossa matrix. Calcareous substrates such as terra rossa, common throughout the region, are often not considered amenable to ground-penetrating radar (GPR) studies due to strong attenuation, particularly within the relatively high frequency range most often used in archaeological GPR surveys. Energy loss due to scattering from small embedded stones also exacerbates attenuation at this particular site in addition to obscuring detected archaeological features, thereby complicating interpretation. Because features are fairly shallow (upper 1.5 m) and contrast well with the soil, however, GPR was successful in spite of poor substrate quality. The selection of a somewhat lower antenna frequency (250 MHz) than is often recommended for archaeology, played a role in the success of the work. The end result expands the known spatial extent of the site by five-fold, increasing our knowledge of architectural and village plans for a time period which is poorly understood in this region. The settlement scale and complexity shown by these new results indicates that Chalcolithic villages are not only present in the Galilee but are as extensive and architecturally sophisticated as contemporaneous settlements in other regions. In combination with excavation results, the structures detected with GPR at Marj Rabba provide the largest plan of an early Chalcolithic settlement in the Galilee. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The site of Marj Rabba is a late prehistoric settlement in lower Galilee, Israel (Fig. 1) dated to the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500e 3600 BC) based on ceramic typology and radiocarbon dates. This key transitional period between the Neolithic and Bronze Age established new social practices, such as secondary burial in formal cemeteries, and sophisticated technological skills, perhaps most dramatically evident in the earliest metallurgy. These indices of increasing social and technological complexity are complemented by a dramatic expansion in population, evident in both increasing size and number of settlements. Our understanding of life in the southern Levant during this period has been largely determined by limited survey and excavations conducted in the Jordan Valley, Negev Desert, and the Golan Heights (Rowan and Golden, 2009). Interpretations of these dramatic changes are thus based on very few fully published sites and a few methodical surveys. In some areas, such as the Galilee, very little data is available from this period; no radiocarbon dates or coherent architectural plans are available from another Chalcolithic settlement. The Galilee Pre- history Project, an Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago research program, seeks to fill in the critical gaps of this important transitional period. This effort has included recent investigations at the Chalcolithic site of Marj Rabba in the lower Galilee region (Rowan et al., 2012). Situated on active agricultural land (Fig. 2), Marj Rabba is located in a region of Israel that exhibits a primarily Mediterranean climate in accordance with standard climate classification schemes (e.g. Köttek et al., 2006). This climate makes the region more suitable for agriculture than nearby arid areas such as the Negev of southern Israel, and also fosters the development of the clay-rich soil type found at Marj Rabba. The site features circular and rectilinear stone foundations (Fig. 3) in at least three different building phases, exposed over five seasons (2009e2013) of exca- vation (Rowan and Kersel, 2014). In 2011, the Galilee Prehistory Project team undertook non-invasive geophysical investigations at Marj Rabba in an attempt to understand the full extent of the site and the distribution of features therein (Fig. 2). These efforts * Corresponding author. E-mail address: thomas.urban@rlaha.ox.ac.uk (T.M. Urban). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jas http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2014.03.013 0305-4403/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Journal of Archaeological Science 46 (2014) 96e106