Working for the Palace, Working for the House:how households became a neighborhood in late 3rd Millennium BC Tell Asmar (ancient Eshnunna), Iraq

Summary

To test the value of the neighborhood concept in archaeological practice, this paper relies on a model of socioeconomically diverse, urban Mesopotamian neighborhoods and tests the model by analyzing households within a neighborhood at Tell Asmar, Iraq. Tell Asmar became one of several major urban settlements in the Diyala River region, with occupation of the site extending back into late prehistory. The dataset comprises a subset of archaeological evidence recovered from the Tell Asmar Northern Palace and Private Houses Area by the 1930s Diyala Expedition excavations and concentrates on late 3rd millennium BC occupation levels, architecture, artifacts, and ancient texts. Using methods of household archaeology to reconstruct household wealth, this paper investigates household artifacts and their findspots within houses, making inferences about activities taking place in different household loci. An analysis of several houses compares households with life cycles spanning the late 3rd millennium BC with late Akkadian households that appeared alongside the architectural reorganization of the Northern Palace. By reconstructing households in the context of the material culture of the Early Dynastic city-states and the Akkadian state, this paper shows how households functioned as a neighborhood, one experiencing growth, decline, and resurgence connected to broader socioeconomic and political developments.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17497