Early Bronze Age Urbanism in Southeastern Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia. Recent Analyses from Titriş Höyük

Anatolica · 2021 · 1 citations

• Geography
• Ancient history
• Archaeology

A Trade-Friendly Environment?: Newly Reconstructed Indian Summer Monsoon Wind Stress Curl Data for the Third Millennium BCE and Their Potential Implications Concerning the Development of Early Bronze Age Trans-Arabian Sea Maritime Trade

Journal of Maritime Archaeology · 2021 · 4 citations

• Geography
• Oceanography
• Ancient history

Stable carbon and oxygen isotope evidence for late third millennium BCE environmental and social change at Titriş Höyük, an Early Bronze Age urban center in the Lower Turkish Euphrates watershed

Routledge eBooks · 2020

• Geography
• Archaeology
• Geology

Elucidating the causes of the decline of many polities during the final centuries of the third millennium BCE remains one of the most important open questions in the archaeology of the Early Bronze Age (EBA) Near East. This phenomenon, which appears to have been particularly intense in northern Mesopotamia, has in recent decades been linked with a global climate fluctuation known as the 4.2 ka event. However, there is still disagreement among researchers regarding whether, and to what extent, this climatic shift was responsible for the widespread evidence of violence, site abandonment, and other disruptions which are characteristic of this period. Here, we employ stable carbon and oxygen isotope analysis on samples of human skeletal tissue to address this unresolved issue in the context of an EBA urban center in southeastern Anatolia known as Titriş Höyük. This city, which was the pre-eminent center in the Karababa Basin for centuries, was one of many sites that declined and were ultimately abandoned during the late third millennium. The results of our analysis suggest that the local climate did indeed become hotter and drier in the Late EBA, but also that this process did not result in the sudden abandonment of the site; instead, it appears that the process of decline at Titriş was gradual enough to leave traces in the isotopic record. Moreover, our data also show that the city’s residents were probably aware of their changing environmental circumstances and that they attempted to adapt through alterations in subsistence strategies.

The tyranny of friction

Origini: Preistoria e protostoria delle civiltà antiche · 2019-01-01 · 1 citations

Entropic Cities: The Paradox of Urbanism in Ancient Mesopotamia

Current Anthropology · 2018-01-03 · 78 citations

The growth of cities in antiquity is paradoxical: before modern health and sanitation standards, early urban dwellers suffered high mortality as a result of epidemics and chronic diseases arising, respectively, from propinquity and poor sanitation. At the same time, lower-status individuals within those cities would have endured depressed birth rates because, typically, many toiled in partially or fully dependent occupations not conducive to early marriage or stable families. The interplay between these compounding forces implies that early cities would not have been viable over the long term and could not have grown without a continual flow of immigrants. The early cities of Mesopotamia were no exception. In an earlier publication, I argued that the growth of the first centers that emerged in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers during the fourth millennium BC was predicated on migratory inflows that took place, in part, in the context of self-amplifying cycles whereby the replacement of imported commodities with locally made, mass-produced substitutes catalyzed increases in specialization, employment, market size, and trade (Smithian growth). In this article, I expand on these ideas, explore their applicability to later periods of Mesopotamian history, and consider further iterations of substitution-fueled growth cycles in those periods.

Robert McCormick Adams: (July 23, 1926–January 27, 2018)

Journal of Anthropological Research · 2018-03-27

Previous articleNext article FreeObituaryRobert McCormick Adams: (July 23, 1926–January 27, 2018)Guillermo AlgazeGuillermo AlgazeUniversity of California San Diego Search for more articles by this author University of California San DiegoPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRobert McCormick Adams was (literally) a towering, larger-than-life scholar whose work bridged the social sciences, the humanities, and the natural sciences. His notable intellectual ability to stride across fields that many other scholars often see as oppositional, but that Adams insightfully always saw as complementary, led him to serve with distinction as director of the Oriental Institute (1962–1968, 1981–1983), the Harold Swift Distinguished Professor of Anthropology (1975–1984), dean of Social Sciences (1970–1974, 1979–1980), and provost (1982–1984), all at the University of Chicago; as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (1984–1994); and, finally, as adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego. His cross-disciplinary outlook led him as well to conduct pathbreaking comparative archaeological research that is widely acknowledged as foundational for how we understand the development of early civilizations across the ancient Near East and worldwide.Robert McCormick Adams in his office during his second stint as director of the Oriental Institute (1981–1983). Courtesy of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointBob Adams made his academic mark early, with seminal articles on Mesopotamian irrigation in the late 1950s and as co-organizer of the fabled Oriental Institute symposium City Invincible (co-edited with Carl Kraeling, 1960), which introduced into ancient Near Eastern scholarship the sort of comparative, longue durée perspective on history and archaeology that Adams perfected throughout his career.Throughout much of his work, Adams emphasized the cultural ecology of the societies he studied, highlighting how cultures adapt to their environment as a key to understanding their evolutionary trajectory. His research explored the usefulness of this perspective in understanding the rise of civilization as a cross-cultural phenomenon. Particularly representative of this facet of Adams’s work are the Henry Lewis Morgan anthropological lectures, which he delivered at the University of Rochester in 1965 (published in book form as The Evolution of Urban Society [1966]). In this lecture series, Adams compared in detail the development of early civilizations in Mesoamerica and Mesopotamia and was able to show the existence of remarkable processual parallels in the ways these otherwise unrelated early civilizations evolved.Adams’s substantial theoretical contributions to understanding the rise of early civilizations were backed up with original and pioneering fieldwork. Most salient in this respect was the long-term program of archaeological surveys that Adams initiated in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the alluvial lowlands along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in modern-day Iraq, where early Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian civilizations once flourished. This program of research continued until the late 1970s, when military deployments that would culminate in the Iran-Iraq war forced its cancellation.Starting from the natural environment of the Mesopotamian lowlands, Adams studied (1) how natural conditions affected human life in the region, (2) what strategies Mesopotamian societies used to adapt to their environment, (3) the selective pressures imposed by that environment that favored the development of urban societies in the area, and (4) how, at times, cities in the area circumvented the ever-changing environmental framework in which they were embedded.Research into these questions involved decades of painstaking fieldwork, conducting wide-scale surveys of large portions of the southern Mesopotamian landscape to locate, record, and date thousands of archaeological sites and relict watercourses. In due time, this work enabled Adams to do what nobody had earlier achieved: document long-term settlement pattern and demographic changes in the Mesopotamian lowlands from the very beginnings of settlement in the area in the sixth millennium bc to the Islamic period.The results of this pioneering research appeared in a series of monographs published by the University of Chicago Press: Land behind Baghdad (1965), The Uruk Countryside (1972, with Hans Nissen), and Heartland of Cities (1981). These monographs are fundamental for understanding the conditions operative at the time the earliest urban centers of Mesopotamia—and the world—first emerged, ca. 3,500 bc. In addition, they provide countless insights into how successive civilizations in Mesopotamia developed, expanded, and collapsed. In so doing, these contributions offer a broad perspective on the interplay that demographic, social, political, and environmental factors had in shaping early history in an area that, rightfully, is commonly referred to as “the cradle of civilization.”Seminal contributions in fieldwork were accompanied by scores of equally influential theoretical contributions published over the past four decades, including both books and articles. Noteworthy among the books is Adams’s account of the development of Western technology, Paths of Fire, published by Princeton University Press (1996). Adams’s interest in the topic was perhaps rooted by his own youthful experiences as a steelworker and was certainly related to his service on multiple committees of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council. Among the myriad seminal articles that come to mind, three are particularly salient: (1) an expansive piece on the role of trade as a motor of Mesopotamian history, published in Current Anthropology (1974); (2) an equally influential paper in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1978) in which Adams explored the relationship between the ecological diversity of the Mesopotamian landscape and the resiliency of the urban institutions that developed there; and (3) a remarkable self-reflective essay published in the Annual Review of Anthropology (2012) in which Adams examines his own career from the perspective of the ebb and flow of anthropological theory in the United States during the preceding half century or so.The impact of the body of work that Adams produced over his career is elegantly described by Norman Yoffee (1997) in his widely read intellectual biography of Adams. In that piece, Yoffee correctly notes that the fact that Mesopotamian civilization is now used by anthropologically oriented anthropologists as a prime example of how ancient states and civilizations evolved is “significantly due to the work of Adams and of those inspired by him” (1997:411). In this light, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the contributions that Adams made to our understanding of ancient Near East civilizations are at the same rarified level as the contributions that the noted French historian Fernand Braudel made to our understanding of the history of the Mediterranean region in the early modern period.Not surprisingly, in view of the foundational nature of his many scholarly contributions, Robert McCormick Adams was granted honorary doctorates by many major universities in both the United States and Denmark, and he was the recipient of numerous major awards from academic associations and institutions, including the Society for American Archaeology (1996), the American Institute of Archaeology (2002), and the Field Museum of Natural History (2003), as well as from the Republic of Panama (1993). Additionally, and significantly, his multiple scholarly contributions were recognized by his election as a member of the most prestigious scholarly academies in the United States, including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Adams was a board member of numerous foundations, universities, and other institutions, including the Santa Fe Institute. During his eventful tenure as Secretary of the Smithsonian, the Institution added the Quadrangle, the National Postal Museum, and, importantly, the National Museum of the American Indian, among other assets and initiatives.Robert McCormick Adams may have passed away, but his extensive body of work remains—and, without question that work will continue to inspire the research agendas of myriad scholars for the foreseeable future.References CitedAdams, R. McC. 1965. Land behind Baghdad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1966. The evolution of urban society. Chicago: Aldine.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1974. Anthropological perspectives on ancient trade. Current Anthropology 15:239–58.First citation in articleLinkGoogle Scholar———. 1978. Strategies of maximization, stability, and resilience in Mesopotamian society, settlement, and agriculture. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 122:329–35.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1981. Heartland of cities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1996. Paths of fire. Princeton: University of Princeton Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2012. Ancient Mesopotamian urbanism and blurred disciplinary boundaries. Annual Review of Anthropology 41:1–20.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle ScholarAdams, R. McC., and H. Nissen. 1972. The Uruk countryside. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarKraeling, C., and R. McC. Adams, eds. 1960. City invincible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarYoffee, N. 1997. Robert McCormick Adams: An archaeological biography. American Antiquity 62:399–413.First citation in articleCrossrefGoogle ScholarEditor’s NoteBob Adams was a member of my Chicago dissertation committee. I will never forget his class on Ralph Linton (!) with Ray Fogelson (which I took as an undergraduate), the terror of watching him play with his Swiss Army knife as I stumbled through my PhD oral exam, his participation (together with his cheroot-smoking wife, Ruth, who was editor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) at generously lubricated student parties in Hyde Park, his sage advice and support while he was dean, and his lecture visit at UNM (and in our home) while he was the Smithsonian secretary. Anthropological archaeology and Near Eastern studies, as well as the nation and world, have lost a monumental (but down-to-earth) intellectual and cultural leader, but we are all richer for his long and most distinguished career.—Lawrence Guy Straus Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 74, Number 2Summer 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/697379HistorySubmitted February 12, 2018Accepted February 12, 2018Published online March 27, 2018 © 2018 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Demographic Trends in Early Mesopotamian Urbanism

2017-09-06 · 5 citations

For reasons relating to disease prevalence and lack of sanitation, ancient Mesopotamian cities were likely characterized by a surfeit of deaths over births. This meant that over the long term such cities could only endure under conditions of sustained urban immigration. Available data is insufficient to accurately estimate the numbers of immigrants that ancient Mesopotamian urban centers would have needed on an annual basis in order to either maintain demographic equilibrium or grow. However, with important caveats, it may be possible to arrive at estimates of urban demographic deficits in ancient Mesopotamia by examining existing archaeological settlement pattern data from the area in light of data for the demographic dynamics of pre-modern cities in northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries ad. Below, a case study is presented illustrating the potential contribution of this comparative approach to understanding the dynamics of Mesopotamian urbanism at the very beginnings of the third millennium bc.

The End of Prehistory and The Uruk Period

2015-02-17 · 2 citations

The Synergies of Civilization

2013-03-29

Abstract This chapter argues that the environmental and geographical advantages accruing to southern Mesopotamian societies and the increases in the density and agglomeration of populations in the alluvium throughout the Uruk period that were selected for by those natural advantages represent necessary but insufficient conditions for the Sumerian takeoff. The sufficient conditions were organizational innovations within the nascent city-states of southern Mesopotamian that fall entirely within the realm of Cronon's "created landscape." Most important among these were new forms of organizing labor that delivered economies of scale in the production of subsistence and industrial commodities to southern societies; and new forms of record keeping that were much more capable of conveying information across time and space than the simpler reckoning systems used by contemporary polities elsewhere. These innovations furnished early Sumerian leaders and polities of the fourth millennium with what turned out to be their most important competitive advantages over neighboring societies.

Conclusions

2013-03-29

Abstract This chapter recapitulates the conjuncture of natural and created landscapes that underpinned the Sumerian takeoff. It also briefly addresses two important logical research corollaries of the takeoff not previously dealt with: why did the precocious protourban experiments of early fourth-millennium Upper Mesopotamia eventually prove unsuccessful? And, why did full-fledged urbanism not arise in the plains of northern Mesopotamia until the middle of the third millennium, eight hundred years or so after comparable phenomena in the southern Mesopotamian alluvium?