Thinking Through Mountains: A Perspective from the ancient Near East

Author(s): Claudia Glatz

Year: 2015

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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Cite this Record

Thinking Through Mountains: A Perspective from the ancient Near East. Claudia Glatz. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396480)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: 25.225; min lat: 15.115 ; max long: 66.709; max lat: 45.583 ;