Tel Hazor is one of only a few sites in Israel where remains of the Intermediate Bronze Age (IBA) in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC were found on top of Early Bronze III (EB III) city remains. A probe excavation was held at Hazor in 2017 to explore the chronological relation between the EB III and the IBA occupation. The radiocarbon (14C) absolute dates generated from this probe excavation show that following the EB III city demise, the site was abandoned for up to a few hundred years before it was resettled in the IBA. 14C dates obtained from the last level of the EB III city are well before 2500 BCE, fully aligned with the recent “High Chronology” for the EBA in the southern Levant. The excavation also produced dates associated with IBA “Black Wheel-Made Ware” vessels, which were found in large numbers at Hazor.

Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj, an agrarian Early Bronze IV village in the northern Jordan Valley, Jordan, provides a series of 24 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) seed dates spanning seven stratified phases of occupation. Bayesian analysis of these ages reveals that habitation at Tell Abu en-Ni‘aj began between 2600 and 2500 cal BC and ended just before 2000 cal BC. This sequence provides the longest radiocarbon record of occupation for an Early Bronze IV settlement in the southern Levant and pushes the beginning of the Levantine Early Bronze IV earlier than proposed previously. When integrated with 14C dates from an array of sites in the southern Levant, Egypt, and Lebanon, this evidence aligns with recent 14C-based chronologies calling for earlier ages for Early Bronze I–III, details Early Bronze IV chronology through the course of this period, and corroborates the date of the Early Bronze IV/Middle Bronze Age transition ~2000 cal BC.