Download or read book Rural Archaeology in Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia written by Glenn M. Schwartz and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2015-12-31 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents the results of the extensive excavation of a small, rural village from the period of emerging cities in upper Mesopotamia (modern northeast Syria) in the early to middle third millennium BC. Prior studies of early Near Eastern urban societies generally focused on the cities and elites, neglecting the rural component of urbanization. This research represents part of a move to rectify that imbalance. Reports on the architecture, pottery, animal bones, plant remains, and other varieties of artifacts and ecofacts enhance our understanding of the role of villages in the formation of urban societies, the economic relationship between small rural sites and urban centers, and status and economic differentiation in villages. Among the significant results are the extensive exposure of a large segment of the village area, revealing details of spatial and social organization and household economics. The predominance of large-scale grain storage and processing leads to questions of staple finance, economic relations with pastoralists, and connections to developing urban centers.
Download or read book Interpreting the Late Neolithic of Upper Mesopotamia written by Olivier Nieuwenhuyse and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The times between the Neolithic and Urban revolutions in Mesopotamia have for a long time been interpreted as a period of stagnation. This volume is part of an emerging discourse that challenges such assumptions. Focussing upon the northern parts of ancient Western Asia, where most recent research has concentrated, an international group of researchers demonstrates that Upper Mesopotamia underwent complex historical changes that we just begin to grasp fully. The Late Neolithic was a critical phase of the history of the ancient Middle East. Authors investigate settlement patterns, practices of painting pottery, distributions of various raw materials, the role of craft industries, the emergence of seals and other issues from a variety of theoretical and practical questions. The book is a must-have for prehistorians working in the Near East, and a rich source of information for archaeologists working in other parts of the world. Olivier Nieuwenhuyse is a Research Fellow at Leiden University and at the DAI-Berlin. His research focuses on reconstructions of landscape and prehistoric settlement and the meanings of material culture. Reinhard Bernbeck is professor at the Freie Universitat Berlin and Binghamton University, New York. His research focuses on critical assessments of ancient Western Asian prehistory and historical periods. Peter Akkermans is professor at Leiden University. He is the director of the excavatons at Tell Sabi Abyad and had published widely on the prehistory of the ancient Near East.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Upper Mesopotamia written by Stefano Anastasio and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 1995 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bibliographical repertory of studies, surveys and excavation reports devoted to Upper Mesopotamia. Analytical indices (topics, themes, items, periods). A concise description of 192 archaeological excavations in Syria, Turkey & Iraq, with their bibliography, location & chronological sequence.
Download or read book Integrative Approaches to the Archaeology and History of K ltepe Kane written by Fikri Kulakoğlu and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of the Kultepe International Meetings (KIM) series draws together multidisciplinary approaches to the archaeology and history of complex urban sites using Kultepe-Kanesh as a case study, with particular emphasis on Bronze Age material. The 3rd Kultepe International Meeting aimed at exploring multidisciplinary approaches to the archaeology and history of complex urban sites using Kultepe-Kanesh as a case study. As a result, the conference proceedings involve a wide variety of disciplines: archaeology, ceramics, paleobotany, paleoecology, palynology, archaeometallurgy, geo- and archaeo-magnetism, art history, philology, history, computer science, and last but not least, videogame design. Indeed, the aim of the Kultepe International Meetings (KIM) is to facilitate the dialogue between these different disciplines and to combine their data in order to build an accurate view of Kultepe and its environment. The 3rd KIM more than fulfilled this goal, demonstrating once again how Kultepe functions as an international experimental laboratory in which disciplines and sub-disciplines can be tested, improved, and developed. All the contributions presented here provide a good overview of the ongoing multidisciplinary studies being carried out at Kultepe and Central Anatolia.
Download or read book Making Ancient Cities written by Andrew T. Creekmore, III and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-28 with total page 443 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume investigates how the structure and use of space developed and changed in cities, and examines the role of different societal groups in shaping urbanism. Culturally and chronologically diverse case studies provide a basis to examine recent theoretical and methodological shifts in the archaeology of ancient cities. The book's primary goal is to examine how ancient cities were made by the people who lived in them. The authors argue that there is a mutually constituting relationship between urban form and the actions and interactions of a plurality of individuals, groups, and institutions, each with their own motivations and identities. Space is therefore socially produced as these agents operate in multiple spheres.
Download or read book Concluding the Neolithic written by Arkadiusz Marciniak and published by Lockwood Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second half of the seventh millennium BC saw the demise of the previously affluent and dynamic Neolithic way of life. The period is marked by significant social and economic transformations of local communities, as manifested in a new spatial organization, patterns of architecture, burial practices, and in chipped stone and pottery manufacture. This volume has three foci. The first concerns the character of these changes in different parts of the Near East with a view to placing them in a broader comparative perspective. The second concerns the social and ideological changes that took place at the end of Neolithic and the beginning of the Chalcolithic that help to explain the disintegration of constitutive principles binding the large centers, the emergence of a new social system, as well as the consequences of this process for the development of full-fledged farming communities in the region and beyond. The third concerns changes in lifeways: subsistence strategies, exploitation of the environment, and, in particular, modes of procurement, consumption, and distribution of different resources.
Download or read book Cities and the Shaping of Memory in the Ancient Near East written by Ömür Harmanşah and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the founding and building of cities in the ancient Near East. The creation of new cities was imagined as an ideological project or a divine intervention in the political narratives and mythologies of Near Eastern cultures, often masking the complex processes behind the social production of urban space. During the Early Iron Age (c.1200–850 BCE), Assyrian and Syro-Hittite rulers developed a highly performative official discourse that revolved around constructing cities, cultivating landscapes, building watercourses, erecting monuments and initiating public festivals. This volume combs through archaeological, epigraphic, visual, architectural and environmental evidence to tell the story of a region from the perspective of its spatial practices, landscape history and architectural technologies. It argues that the cultural processes of the making of urban spaces shape collective memory and identity as well as sites of political performance and state spectacle.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization written by Guillermo Algaze and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Mesopotamia are widely known as the “cradle of civilization,” owing to the scale of the processes of urbanization that took place in the area by the second half of the fourth millennium BCE. In Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization, Guillermo Algaze draws on the work of modern economic geographers to explore how the unique river-based ecology and geography of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvium affected the development of urban civilization in southern Mesopotamia. He argues that these natural conditions granted southern polities significant competitive advantages over their landlocked rivals elsewhere in Southwest Asia, most importantly the ability to easily transport commodities. In due course, this resulted in increased trade and economic activity and higher population densities in the south than were possible elsewhere. As southern polities grew in scale and complexity throughout the fourth millennium, revolutionary new forms of labor organization and record keeping were created, and it is these socially created innovations, Algaze argues, that ultimately account for why fully developed city-states emerged earlier in southern Mesopotamia than elsewhere in Southwest Asia or the world.
Download or read book Ancient Mesopotamia written by A. Leo Oppenheim and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and Assyria."—Edward B. Garside, New York Times Book Review Ancient Mesopotamia—the area now called Iraq—has received less attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other land in the early Near East. Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had begun. "To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one of the most valuable books ever written."—Leonard Cottrell, Book Week "Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred years in the field of Assyriological research."—Samuel Noah Kramer, Archaeology A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of our time, was editor in charge of the Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
Download or read book Investigating Upper Mesopotamian Households Using Micro archaeological Techniques written by Lynn Rainville and published by British Archaeological Reports Oxford Limited. This book was released on 2005 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lynn Rainville's revised thesis uses micro-debris analyis' to investigate aspects of domestic life in three Early Bronze Age sites, two urban and one rural, in southeastern Turkey.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Mesopotamia written by Roger Matthews and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only critical guide to the theory and method of Mesopotamian archaeology, this innovative volume evaluates the theories, methods, approaches and history of Mesopotamian archaeology from its origins in the nineteenth century up to the present day. Ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), was the original site of many of the major developments in human history, such as farming, the rise of urban literate societies and the first great empires of Akkad, Babylonia and Assyria. Dr. Matthews places the discipline within its historical and social context, and explains how archaeologists conduct their research through excavation, survey and other methods. In four fundamental chapters, he uses illustrated case-studies to show how archaeologists have approached central themes such as: * the shift from hunting to farming * complex societies * empires and imperialism * everyday life. This will be both an ideal introductory work and useful as background reading on a wide range of courses.
Download or read book Early Stages in the Evolution of Mesopotamian Civilization written by Norman Yoffee and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1969 and 1980, Soviet archaeologists conducted excavations of Mesopotamian villages occupied from preagricultural times through the beginnings of early civilization. The results of their work were published primarily in Soviet journals and in the English-language journals Sumer and Iraq. This volume brings together translations of these Russian articles along with newly commissioned work to make the results of this research accessible for the first time to the Western world. In addition to eight articles available here for the first time in English, a concluding chapter by Norman Yoffee offers new insights on cultural interaction based on the research at hand. The research conducted by the Soviets helped transform our knowledge of the early post-Paleolithic prehistory of Mesopotamia.
Download or read book written by Jason A. Ur and published by Oriental Inst Publications Sales. This book was released on 2010 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tell Hamoukar is one of the largest Bronze Age sites in northern Mesopotamia. The present volume presents the results of three seasons of field survey and remote-sensing analysis at the site and its region. These studies were undertaken to address questions of urban origins, land use and demographic trends through time. Site descriptions and settlement histories are presented for Hamoukar and 59 other sites in its immediate hinterland over the last 8,000 years. The project paid close attention to the "off-site" landscape between sites and considered aspects of agricultural practices, land tenure and patterns of movement. For each phase of occupation, the patterns of settlement and land use are contextualised within larger patterns of Mesopotamian history, with particular attention to the proto-urban fifth millennium BC, the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC, the height of urbanism in the late third millennium, the impact of the Assyrian empire in the early first millennium BC and the Abbasid landscape of the late first millennium AD. The volume also includes a description of the unparalleled landscape of tracks in the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province, northeastern Syria. Through analysis of CORONA satellite photographs, over 6,000 kilometres of pre-modern trackways were identified and mapped, mostly dating to the late third millennium and early Islamic periods. This area of northern Mesopotamia is thus one of the best-preserved ancient landscapes of movement in the world. The volume's appendices describe the 60 sites, their surface assemblages and the survey's ceramic typology.
Download or read book An Der Nordgrenze Der Vorderasiatischen Arch ologie written by Elena Rova and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 35 papers, originally presented by an international group of researchers at a conference held in Venice in January 2013, present the results of the last 20 years of archaeological research about the pre-classical cultures of the Caucasus and Anatolia, and analyse the latter in the wider framework of their changing relations with those of the Ancient Near East and of the Eurasian steppes. The volume covers a wide chronological span - from the late 5th to the early 1st millennium BC, and includes contributions about a wide range of topics (reports of archaeological excavations and surveys, chronology, economy, social organisation of the ancient populations, technology, long-distance exchange of raw materials and artefacts, archaeometallurgy, landscape archaeology, etc.). According to the most recent developments of research, these are investigated in a remarkably interdisciplinary perspective. The participation to the conference of well-recognised experts working not only in different countries of the Southern Caucasus and in Anatolia (in present-day Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkey) but also in the North-Caucasian republics of the present-day Russian Federation offered a rare opportunity to compare and discuss recent trends of archaeological research in these different regions. Therefore, this volume represents a fundamental contribution to both Near Eastern and Caucasian Archaeology.
Download or read book First Civilizations written by Robert Chadwick and published by Equinox Publishing Ltd.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Civilizations is the second edition of a popular student text first published in 1996 in Montreal by Les Editions Champ Fleury. This much updated and expanded edition provides an introductory overview of the civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. It was conceived primarily for students who have little or no knowledge of ancient history or archaeology. The book begins with the role of history and archaeology in understanding the past, and continues with the origins of agriculture and the formation of the Sumerian city-states in Mesopotamia. Three subsequent chapters concentrate on Assyrian and Babylonian history and culture. The second half of the book focuses on Egypt, begining with the physical environment of the Nile, the formation of the Egyptian state and the Old Kingdom. Subsequent chapters discuss the Middle Kingdom, the Hyksos period, and the 18th Dynasty, with space devoted to Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, the Ramesside period. The text ends with the Persian conquest of Mesopotamia and Egypt. First Civilizations also contains sections on astronomy, medicine, architecture, eschatology, religion, burial practices and mummification, and discusses the myths of Gilgamesh, Isis and Osiris. Each chapter has a basic bibliography which emphasizes English language encyclopedias, books and journals specializing in the ancient Near East.
Download or read book The Archaeology of Mobility written by Hans Barnard and published by Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press. This book was released on 2008-12-31 with total page 617 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There have been edited books on the archaeology of nomadism in various regions, and there have been individual archaeological and anthropological monographs, but nothing with the kind of coverage provided in this volume. Its strength and importance lies in the fact that it brings together a worldwide collection of studies of the archaeology of mobility. This book provides a ready-made reference to this worldwide phenomenon and is unique in that it tries to redefine pastoralism within a larger context by the term mobility. It presents many new ideas and thoughtful approaches, especially in the Central Asian region.
Download or read book A Companion to Ancient Agriculture written by David Hollander and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 736 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book-length overview of agricultural development in the ancient world A Companion to Ancient Agriculture is an authoritative overview of the history and development of agriculture in the ancient world. Focusing primarily on the Near East and Mediterranean regions, this unique text explores the cultivation of the soil and rearing of animals through centuries of human civilization—from the Neolithic beginnings of agriculture to Late Antiquity. Chapters written by the leading scholars in their fields present a multidisciplinary examination of the agricultural methods and influences that have enabled humans to survive and prosper. Consisting of thirty-one chapters, the Companion presents essays on a range of topics that include economic-political, anthropological, zooarchaeological, ethnobotanical, and archaeobotanical investigation of ancient agriculture. Chronologically-organized chapters offer in-depth discussions of agriculture in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia, Hellenistic Greece and Imperial Rome, Iran and Central Asia, and other regions. Sections on comparative agricultural history discuss agriculture in the Indian subcontinent and prehistoric China while an insightful concluding section helps readers understand ancient agriculture from a modern perspective. Fills the need for a full-length biophysical and social overview of ancient agriculture Provides clear accounts of the current state of research written by experts in their respective areas Places ancient Mediterranean agriculture in conversation with contemporary practice in Eastern and Southern Asia Includes coverage of analysis of stable isotopes in ancient agricultural cultivation Offers plentiful illustrations, references, case studies, and further reading suggestions A Companion to Ancient Agriculture is a much-needed resource for advanced students, instructors, scholars, and researchers in fields such as agricultural history, ancient economics, and in broader disciplines including classics, archaeology, and ancient history.
