Early Mesopotamian Urbanism and Social Stress: Violent Conflict at Fourth Millennium BCE Tell Brak, NE Syria

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Warfare and the Origins of Political Control " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Past urbanism is usually reconstructed as a positive development, with cities presented as locations of economic efficiency, technological innovation, and productive social networks. But past cities also presented challenges, as sources of disease, inequalities, and high mortality. At Tell Brak (NE Syria/northern Mesopotamia), urban growth in the early fourth millennium BCE coincided with several episodes of extreme social stress, generating violent conflict and resulting in mass graves of up to several hundred dead individuals. These mass graves mixed the bodies of the dead and showed evidence of other corpse abuses, in targeted ways that denied their personal identities. The creation of a burial mound over the graves commemorated the battle and served as a strong physical and ideological signal of the new power in the urban landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Warfare and the Origins of Political Control   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37263.0