"Revolutions in the Desert investigates the development of pastoral nomadism in the fertile heartland of the ancient Near East, challenging the prevailing notion that such societies left few remains appropriate for analytic study. Few prior studies have approached the deeper past of desert nomadic societies, which have been primarily recognized only as a complement to the study of sedentary agricultural societies in the region. Based on decades of archaeological field work in the Negev of southern Israel, both excavations and surveys, and integrating materials from adjacent regions, Revolutions in the Desert offers a deeper and more dynamic view of the rise of herding societies beyond the settled zone"--

Negev focuses on two primary purposes, one theoretical/methodological and the second substantive. Briefly stated, the book comprises a case study of excavations at an early (ca. 2800 B.C.) pastoral site in the Negev, providing detailed analyses and a synthetic overview of a seasonal encampment from this early period in the evolution of desert pastoral societies. It thus both demonstrates the feasibility of an archaeology of early mobile pastoralism and grapples with the basic anthropological and methodological issues surrounding the subject. Substantively, both the architectural and material culture assemblages uncovered constitute the first detailed analysis of this early desert culture and include materials previously unreported for the region and period. Historically, the Camel Site is placed in a larger perspective of the beginnings of multiresource nomadism in relation to the rise of complex societies.