Tel Megiddo in the Jezreel Valley of Israel has been the most cited type-site of the Early Bronze Age Levant since the excavations of the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. 

Excavations at Tel Megiddo have revealed evidence of an unprecedented leap in monumental building activity in the late Early Bronze Age I with the construction of the 1,100-square-meter Great Temple. Subsequent research, survey, and excavation by the Jezreel Valley Regional Project identified a contemporary site just east of this cultic acropolis, now called Tel Megiddo East (TME), which appears to have been the primary settlement associated with it.

In a recent study by Regev et al. (2012), the radiocarbon data of Southern Levant was reanalyzed, causing a revision of the traditional absolute chronology of the Early Bronze Age in the Southern Levant. The new analysis demonstrated that the EB II was notably shorter than previously thought and that the EB III ended ca. 2500 BC, ca. 200‒300 years earlier than the traditional chronologies.

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The article presents an updated description of the Early Bronze I finds in Area J at Megiddo, in view of the results of the 1998 and 2000 seasons. Specifically, it discusses the layout of the Level J-4 (EB IB) monumental temple, the circumstances of its abandonment and a phase of renewal of activity at the ruined temple in Level J-4a (also dating to the EB IB). 

The Early Bronze (EB) Ib Temple of Megiddo Level J-4, with its complex architecture, marks an important threshold in the development of complex societies that characterized the Early Bronze Age of the Levant. The temple was abandoned at the end of the EB Ib, leaving behind few traces of the activities performed within it, the primary remains being the deposit of sacrificial waste of animal bones found in different localities within the structure and its vicinity.