Recent evidence from the Aravah Valley challenges the prevailing assumption
that Bedouin ethnography and inferences from ancient Near Eastern archives
can adequately compensate for the archaeological lacuna in the study of
biblical-era nomads. The evidence indicates that nomadic social organization
at the turn of the 1st millennium BCE could have been – and in at least one
case was – far more complex than ever considered before. This paper discusses
the implications of the now extended spectrum of possible interpretations
of nomads to the archaeological discourse on early Iron Age state formation
processes in the Southern Levant.