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Early Urbanizations in the Levant: A Regional Narrative, by Raphael Greenberg. New York: Leicester University Press, 2002. xii + 141 pp., 47 figures, 4 tables. Cloth. $145.00.
It has come to be expected that a successful Ph.D. thesis should be followed by a book either wholly or in part derived from the thesis. That these books often make very tedious reading and are rarely successful in bridging the transition from thesis to book seems to be of less concern than getting that first published volume on the curriculum vitae. For this reason I find I am usually reluctant to read these "published theses" in any depth and find them at best a useful synthesis of material or occasionally in some part a welcomed discussion of some original data. I was more than pleasantly surprised, however, in the case of this volume by Raphael Greenberg to find that it makes the transition from thesis to book rather successfully and provides both an interesting discussion and synthesis of current research and new and useful interpretations of his recent regional fieldwork. As Greenberg points out in his introduction, the volume is a revised and expanded translation of the author's Ph.D. thesis completed at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. The topic of the volume, a discussion of the nature of early urbanizations (the author prefers the plural here) in the Levant, is approached through a systematic examination of the environmental, archaeological, and chronological foundations of these developments within a specific region of the southern Levant-the Hula Valley of northern Israel. The author's familiarity with the region, having spent what he describes as some 15 years of intermittent fieldwork and study there, provides a well-researched and solid foundation IOr his analysis of these urban developments from the late fourth through early second millennium (from the beginning of the Early Bronze Age through the MB I period) in the Hula Valley. The overall approach to this exploration of social processes in the Hula Valley betrays the underlying structure of the thesis, but happily the sheer quality of the organization of the discussion and the clarity of the writing carry the reader along and make a very...