The 10th century BCE date that Nelson Glueck suggested for the major smelting sites in the copper ore district of Timna Valley (Israel) was rejected and entirely revised by the long term and pioneering research of Beno Rothenberg and the Arava Expedition. They pushed metal production back to the Late Bronze Age (14th – mid-12th centuries BCE) and claimed the smelting enterprise was controlled by the Egyptians. This dating was mostly based on artifacts from the ‘Egyptian sanctuary’ and a weak correlation to finds from the smelting sites, with a paucity of radiocarbon dates to support this chronological framework. A compilation of all available radiocarbon dates from Timna indicates much more Iron Age copper production activities at this area, and question the reliability of material culture typological dating in sites where datable materials are scarce (e.g., indicative pottery sherds).

Stratum I at Site 30 is the only context in Timna Valley that the Arava Expedition indicated as representing 10th century BCE smelting activities, a period of a peak in copper production at Faynan (Jordan, ca. 100 km to the north). Thus, as part of the investigation of the Iron Age copper industry of Faynan, and with the intention of gaining complementary insights on the 10th century copper industry of the southern Levant, we returned to Site 30 and conducted a small scale excavation focusing on obtaining high resolution radiocarbon dating and complementary archaeomagnetic measurements (to help with inter site correlations).

While re-exposing a section in a ‘slag mound’ and excavating a new 5 x 2.5 m sounding in a metallurgical area from surface to bedrock at Site 30, we obtained 11 radiocarbon samples from excellent contexts, most of which are short-lived seeds and twigs. The date range, which covers the entire stratigraphic sequence of the site, is confined to the late 12th through 9th centuries BCE, corresponding to the industrial development recorded recently at Faynan. This correlation is tightened by an archaeomegnetic study of slag fragments from the excavated sections of Timna 30, Khirbat en-Nahas and Khirbat al-Jariya in Faynan.

Site 30 is one of the largest and most sophisticated smelting sites in Timna Valley (ca. 4 hectare). Our results indicate clearly that there is no evidence for Late Bronze Age activities at the site as was previously suggested, and necessitate a revision of the conclusions of the Arava Expedition, especially regarding the material culture of Timna 30. The results also demonstrate the strength of high precision dating techniques (radiocarbon, geomagnetic archaeointensity) in establishing a firm chronological framework for the metallurgical sites in the southern Levant. The data call into question previously assigned dates based only on comparative material culture studies. Establishing a reliable chronology for the Iron Age metallurgical sites in the southern Levant is of major interest, as the resurgence of copper production during this time relates to global processes that happened in the eastern Mediterranean in the wake of widespread civilization collapse, when new socio-economic opportunities became available to local societies, such as Biblical Israel and Edom, who lived on the periphery of the once vibrant Late Bronze Age core civilizations of Egypt, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.