CHRONOLOGICAL SETTING OF TEL NAMI'S LB SANCTUARY: LOCAL AND COASTAL CERAMICS.
Yossi Salmon, Ragna Stidsing

Large parts of a cultic precinct with a sanctuary and adjacent rooms have been uncovered in area G at the summit of Tel Nami, approximately 20 km south of Haifa. The sanctuary, which seems to have functioned only for a very short duration, has been dated to the late 13^th early 12^th centuries on the basis of three main chronological anchors, 1: a scarab with the name of Ramses II, 2: the appearance of Cypriote and Mycenaean imports, and 3: the architecture of the sanctuary, which belongs to a group of sanctuaries, classified as "Irregular Temples", known from several Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age sites in the Levant and the Aegean.
The material culture includes a varied ceramic corpus of local and foreign plain domestic and cultic pottery that is characteristic of both the LB and EI. It is thus comparable to ceramic assemblages from both LB and EI sites in the region, and consequently offers a good setting for the examination of the transition period between these periods.
When the chronological aspects of a site are analyzed, often little attention is paid to chronological range of the ceramic corpus of plain wares. This is due to the fact that Plain ware types often continue in an unaltered shape over a long time span. This characterizes the period under discussion.
In this talk the preliminary results of an analysis of the chronological range of selective plain ware pottery-forms (bowls, kraters, pithoi, lamps, and others) from the Tel Nami sanctuary will be presented. These are based on comparisons with analogous pottery-types from other sites and by this define the chronological and cultural setting of the sanctuary.