Thinking Through Mountains: A Perspective from the ancient Near East

Summary

The Middle East and surrounding areas are among the most mountainous regions of the world, where a combination of material and written records provides a unique opportunity to explore highland-lowland interaction in the distant past and over the long-term. This includes issues of relevance to current efforts to document, preserve and protect mountain regions and ways of life, such as the movement of people, goods and ideas, the environmental and resource contexts and consequences of such interactions, as well as issues of mutual perception and processes of identity construction that resonate with more recent poplar prejudices and scholarly approaches to mountain regions and communities. In this paper, I want to take a critical look at the conceptual frameworks through which modern scholarship has come to approach past and present highland people and landscapes, and, using examples from the ancient Near East, explore avenues of investigation, which can provide a more balanced perspective of highland-lowland interconnectivity and the long-term socio-cultural consequences of such interaction.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Connecting highlands and lowlands – Towards a holistic approach to upland and lowland symbiosis in the past, present and for the future

Keywords

Spatial Coverage