Marshlands and Early Mesopotamian Urban Form

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Wetlands" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The marshlands of the Tigris-Euphrates delta were for millennia among the largest wetland systems in Eurasia. The Gulf coast, the river delta, and marshes extended further north ca. 8000–2000 BCE than they do today. As a result, the world’s earliest cities in southern Mesopotamia may have emerged 6,000–5,000 years ago within or on the edge of wetland and littoral zones. Cuneiform texts, archaeological evidence, and geoarchaeological data make clear that marsh resources were central to some early cities’ economies. In this paper, I consider how a wetland environment, and later environmental shifts, may have affected early Mesopotamian urban form. Remote sensing and survey data demonstrate that the third millennium BC city of Lagash (Tell al-Hiba) was composed of spatially discrete sectors bounded by multiple surrounding walls and watercourses and separated by open spaces. The evidence is suggestive of a marshy or watery local environment, corroborating geographical reconstructions from cuneiform texts. The discontinuous, walled nature of inhabited areas differs from the nucleated form of later Mesopotamian cities, and would have had social and logistical ramifications for inhabitants. Spatial ethnoarchaeological observations collected from archival images (1950s–1970s) of recent Iraqi marsh settlements aid in interpretation of the archaeological data.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Archaeology of Wetlands   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39799.0