Settlement patterns as a mirror: resilience and renovation subsistence strategies of the Southern Levant communities in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age crisis

During the last quarter of the second millennium BC, the entire Levantine area was affected by a multifactorial crisis that led to the great empires imploding and the end of the city-states entities with the subsequent rearrangement of their whole administrative system. A recent study of the Southern Levantine region conducted during my Ph.D. has highlighted the advent of small village communities located in the area according to a dendritic pattern imposed mostly by the river’s network features. Starting from the observation of the settlement pattern this paper aims to explain how does the anthropic landscape change in the aftermath of the crisis and what the weight of the environmental component in the development of these communities was through both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the sites, their distribution, and above all through a comparison of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age systems.