Public passageways enable people, animals and goods to navigate a built environment, allowing access to residences, shops and public buildings, and also demarcate the spheres of society: economic versus social, sacred versus profane and public versus private. Passageways also mark the arrangement of neighborhoods and typically reflect a purposeful organization for settlements. This paper explores the nature of passageways at early urban settlements in the Southern Levant, and particularly their placement and maintenance in Early Bronze Age domestic neighborhoods. To this end, it summarizes the architecture, stratigraphy and artifactual remains associated with an alleyway in the recently excavated domestic neighborhood at Early Bronze Age III Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel (c. 2900–2400 BCE).
Greenfield et al. (2026) studied this question.