Plant and Animal Remains from Old Babylonian Ur

Summary

Archaeologists have been examining the great cities of ancient southern Mesopotamia for well over a century now, but as yet we have limited understanding of their subsistence economies. For decades researchers more or less ignored the wealth of faunal and botanical remains in and around ancient Mesopotamian architecture. Over the course of the twentieth century researchers began to recover animal bones and teeth, but as few digs dry-screened or floated their soils the resulting assemblages could not reveal the realities of ancient animal and plant management and exploitation. We present on fully screened and floated deposits from Old Babylonian (first half of the second millennium BCE) levels at the famed site of Ur. We compare and contrast remains from household middens inside the ancient city. We summarize plant and animal taxonomic proportions as well as animal skeletal element distributions and taphonomic characteristics. We provide a brief overview of the revealed Old Babylonian economy and discuss the extent of economic differentiation at Ur.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21381