A morphometric approach to the classification and sequencing of the Iron Age II pottery of Tel Ashkelon, Israel

The present study represents the first major effort toward establishing a ceramic sequence of the Iron Age II strata at Tel Ashkelon, Israel. A morphometric methodology is developed and used for the classification of the representative rim-forms of the assemblages from Phases 16-14 of Grid 38, Tel Ashkelon. The result is a typology of ceramic corpus that is scalable, i.e., it can be analyzed at different levels of precision, and the ceramic sequence based on this 'core' set of data is then used to establish the dating of the ceramic sequence in Grid 2 of Tel Ashkelon. The comparison of the assemblage with the published data from elsewhere in the Southern Coast of Israel demonstrates that, while much of the ceramic forms found in the Iron Age II Tel Ashkelon were common to the region in general, Tel Ashkelon was second to none in the region in exhibiting an affinity with the Phoenician assemblages of the contemporary sites on the coast to the north. Both the Phoenician affinity and the high frequency of the storage jar-class in its corpus suggest that the shaping of the ceramic culture of the Iron Age II Tel Ashkelon was largely driven by economic factors, perhaps to be attributed to the site's location as a "port power" with "access resources". While the end-result of this acculturating process had frequently been noted in the studies devoted to the 7 th century BCE horizon, the detailed analysis in the present study of the forms in the entire sequence (i.e., 10 th -7 th centuries BCE) clearly demonstrates that this was a process at work throughout the entire Iron Age II at Tel Ashkelon.