In light of recent research on the Early Bronze Age in Palestine it is now accepted that an urban society first appeared in this region during the period of transition from the Early Bronze Ib to the Early Bronze II (Amiran 1970; 1978; Schaub 1982; Esse 1991: 146; Stager 1993). In this article we present an empirical and theoretical account of this transition process according to a) spatio-archaeological data accumulated in Israel in recent years and b) a theory of social change outlined below based on structural differences between agricultural and urban societies. The transition to urbanism is commonly regarded, albeit implicitly, in terms of progress. This is so in Childe's (1950) seminal Urban Revolution, and in subsequent studies (Andreev 1989) including studies on urbanization in EB Palestine (Amiran 1970; Kempinski 1978; Esse 1991: 175). We propose here that the process in Palestine was associated with crisis and social disintegration. We apply the notion of urbanization to the transition from EB I to EB II, and consider EB II" urban", in spite of the doubts recently raised by some researchers (Schaub 1982; Fa1cooner 1989; Hanbury-Tenison 1989) regarding the" urbanity" of EB II Palestine. The questions of time, progress and urbanity form three aspects of what might be termed the" urban question" of EB Palestine. Other aspects of the urban question include the issue of diffusion-the extent to which EB urbanization in Palestine was a local process resulting from internal developments of EB I society, or an" imported" or diffused urbanization (Amiran 1970; de Vaux 1971; Ai 1972: 117-118; Callaway 1982: 77). In our opinion, immigrants from a non-urban culture in the north, arrived to Palestine in EB I. These immigrants were aware of urbanism, and underwent their own urban revolutionj transformation toward the end of the EBIb period.

A second aspect of EB urbanization is the nature and spatial structure of the urban settlement system which emerged in the transition from EB Ib to EB II. The prevalent view is that of a system of relatively independent cities (possibly similar to systems of city-states that we find in other parts of the Levant in that period), from Dan and Abel-beth-Maachah in the north to Arad in the south (Amiran and Gophna 1989: 112). Finkelstein (1990) has recently suggested that this settlement system was composed of a northern spatial structure of a system of cities, and a