[2] He is notable for having introduced new interpretive tools (analytical lenses) for studying long-term processes of cultural production and change in the Eastern Mediterranean and for pioneering community archaeology in the region.
[13] Study of animal bone fragments and other artifacts from Tall Hisban allowed documentation of long-term cycles of intensification and abatement in the local food system, which in turn were accompanied by cyclic episodes of sedentarization and nomadization.
The intensification-abatement framework has since been adopted by researchers studying long-term historical changes elsewhere in Jordan,[14] in the Late Antique Southern Levant,[15] the Mediterranean,[16] and Europe.
[20] LaBianca has argued that the late arrival of bureaucracy, monumentality and writing in the Southern Levant (when compared with Egypt and Mesopotamia) is attributable to the centrifugal force exerted by persistent tribalism that bends social order in the region in the direction of multiple centers of power (endemic polycentrism).
[22] This is the rationale behind the tribal kingdom hypothesis as the basis for understanding the nature of secondary states that arose during the Iron Age in the Southern Levant such as the Ammonites, Israelites, Moabites and Edomites.