FUNNELS AS INDICATORS OF STORAGE ACTIVITIES IN THE IRON II SOUTHERN LEVANT

Although literally hundreds of houses have been excavated in the southern Levant, it is not easy to use them to study past spatial activities. While modern excavations allow high-resolution reconstructions, due to the costs involved only a limited number of houses are excavated nowadays in their entirety; the recording of the hundreds of houses excavated until the 1960s was partial and much of the material (e.g. botanical remains, bones, charred material, etc.) was not even collected. Some of the older reports recorded the distribution of macro-artefacts, mainly pottery, and a concentration of storage vessels, for example, may indicate that a room was used for storage. The products stored, however, cannot usually be determined. This article suggests that the volumes and forms of funnels may indicate whether they funnelled dry products, liquids or precious fluids, and can therefore be used to identify specialized activities even from reports of older excavations, when other lines of evidence are lacking.