Mesopotamia (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Creekmore.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Upper Mesopotamia the Middle Bronze Age (2000 – 1600 B.C.E.) marked the regrowth of cities following the decline or collapse of cities at the end of the Early Bronze Age. Researchers question the degree of continuity in urban space across these periods and some have suggested that Middle Bronze Age cities were "hollow," containing relatively small built-up...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Hammer.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Rutz.

Textual sources from southern Iraq’s early historical periods constitute a surprisingly rich body of material for exploring highland-lowland interactions in ancient southwest Asia. Cuneiform inscriptions typically convey only one perspective on these interactions, namely, that of the elite inhabitants of city-states and territorial polities of the southern Mesopotamian alluvium. However, these decidedly one-sided representations were hardly monolithic, and in this paper I explore the various...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel W. Palka.

This study explores the possibility that some Mesopotamian clay tokens were pilgrim’s tokens, which signified interaction with spiritual powers or transactions with a shrine’s religious specialists or administrators. Pilgrim’s tokens around the world have often been made of earth and clay, some as effigies of goods desired or symbols of shrines and their spiritual forces, that are carried in bags, miniature ceramic vessels, or bullae. Previous investigations indicate that earthen artifacts have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Ur.

Discussions of "alternative" trajectories of urban growth are often compared to "classic" models from Old World civilizations, and most often Mesopotamia. It is said that Mesopotamian cities were dense and spatially discrete from their agricultural hinterlands, in contrast to new models of low-density urbanism. In fact, the earliest large settlement agglomerations ("megasites") in Mesopotamia were discontinuous and far less dense than the mature cities of the Bronze Age (after 3000 BC). This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gil Stein.

Although much scholarship has focused on the emergence of towns and cities in southern Mesopotamia, archaeologists still know very little about comparable developments in northern Mesopotamia and especially Iraqi Kurdistan, due to the rarity of archaeological fieldwork in those regions until recently. The excavation project based at Surezha on the Erbil plain aims to contribute to our understanding of Chalcolithic northern Mesopotamia and illuminate the development of social complexity in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Norman Yoffee.

Over the years, Vern Scarborough has considered how water management systems have been created, altered, and in some cases abandoned, especially in response to the evolution of political systems. For a Mesopotamianist, Vern's work obviously resonates with that of Robert McC. Adams. In this paper I review some of the lasting contributions of Adams to the study of water management systems in Mesopotamia. I review especially a series of essays that Adams wrote after his retirement from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Hopwood.

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a unique category of socially charged material culture, beer has origins stretching back to people’s first obsession with wild grain. The deep time prehistory of beer coupled with the unique role of its psychoactive properties makes it a compelling bridge between academic archaeology and the public, allowing...