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Fortification walls and other buildings discovered during renewed excavations at Tel Erani (Tell esh-Sheikh el-Areyni) shed new light on the beginnings of urbanisation in the Southern Levant during the second half of the fourth millennium BC.

Tel ʿErani is a large Early Bronze Age site within the municipal bounds of modern Qiryat Gat, Israel, at the northeastern edge of the Negev, adjacent to the Judean Shephelah (piedmont). It in- cludes a high mound and several lower terraces, ca. 25 ha in area. The site gained notoriety when an imported potsherd bearing an Egyptian royal symbol (a serekh) incised with the hieroglyph of an early ruler, Narmer, was found in Excavation Area D. Large-scale exposure there in the 1950s and 1960s, under the direction of Shmuel Yeivin, unearthed a rather lengthy and complicated stratigraphic sequence that has prompted numerous attempts at correlating its Early Bronze Age strata with Dynasty 0 and the early 1st Dynasty in Egypt. Yeivin’s cursorily published results il- lustrate only partial and rudimentary plans of the Early Bronze Age strata in Area D, most of which lack elevations. One exceptionally large building boasting seven substantial mudbrick pil- lars has attracted researchers’ attention, as it likely had a public function. This essay, based on Yeivin’s original, unpublished plans that include elevations, as well as information derived from recent excavations in Area D, offers a detailed reconstruction of the plan of that building, which suggests its likely chrono-stratigraphic ascription to late phases of the Early Bronze I. It further notes its importance for understanding the relationship between Egypt and the southern Levant in this late prehistoric period, and especially the place of Tel ʿErani as one of a growing number of sites in the southern Levant known to yield definitive evidence for the onset of its earliest complex, hierarchical societies in the first centuries of the 4th millennium b.c.e.

The HLC (Heritage-Landscape-Community) archaeological metaproject, carried out since 2016 by the Jagiellonian University in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, targets the archaeological heritage of southern Jordan (Tafila region), focusing currently on remains of the Early Bronze Age and earlier cultures that were found in the region. The project has already identified and verified several previously undocumented or poorly documented sites. Its main objective is to establish chronological phasing of human activity in this microregion, particularly during the Early Bronze Age and to assess the scale and nature of human presence in that period. Two sites, Faysaliyya and Munqata’a, were excavated within the frame of the project. The article presents the preliminary results of this work. An important side issue is the protection of Jordanian heritage in the Tafila region through the identification of natural and human agents that may damage or destroy it. The HLC (Heritage-Landscape-Community) archaeological metaproject, carried out since 2016 by the Jagiellonian University in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities, Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism, Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, targets the archaeological heritage of southern Jordan (Tafila region), focusing currently on remains of the Early Bronze Age and earlier cultures that were found in the region. The project has already identified and verified several previously undocumented or poorly documented sites. Its main objective is to establish chronological phasing of human activity in this microregion, particularly during the Early Bronze Age, and to assess the scale and nature of human presence in that period. Two sites, Faysaliyya and Munqata’a, were excavated within the frame of the project. The article presents the preliminary results of this work. An important side issue is the protection of Jordanian heritage in the Tafila region through the identification of natural and human agents that may damage or destroy it.