Mesopotamian Megasites before Uruk

Summary

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 paper describes two such early sites, Tell Brak and Khirbat al-Fakhar (Hamoukar), both of which grew to large spatial (and possibly demographic) scale centuries before Uruk. Rather than seeing them as experiments that failed, this low-density "proto-urban" phase of the late fifth-early fourth millennium BC was on a trajectory toward the classic Mesopotamian urban model, one that archaeologists have failed to recognize due to methods and taphonomic factors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• What to Do with "Megasites" in Prehistory? Further Exploring the "Megasite" Conundrum

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15471