Pottery Traditions: Regionality, Longevity, and Specialization Tall Ya’moun and Tall al-Assara

This chapter focuses specifically on the pottery collected through excavations at two key sites in the region: Tall Ya’moun and Tall al-Assara. In this chapter, our goal is threefold: first, to highlight particular ceramic examples recovered from the 2022 Tall Ya’moun and Tall al-Assara excavations as a way of understanding the community’s place in the broader Iron Age landscape of northern Jordan; second, to situate these finds within a wider network of regional parallels and comparisons; and third, to use this evidence to reflect on broader patterns of settlement and changing social complexity in the first millennium. To do so, it is important to focus on the ceramic material prior to this period to give context to the development of the site through time. This material is central to this discussion as it connects both Tall al-Assara and Tall Ya’moun into longer-term regional trajectories and provide promising directions for future research, especially when integrated with survey data (see Chapter 3).