Seminars

The Ancient Near East

  • Founded
    1966
  • Seminar Number
    479

This seminar was created to coordinate the archaeological chronologies of the regions of the Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean. It meets from six to eight times a year to discuss new research and hear reports of recent fieldwork. A number of relevant papers were published in the American Journal of Archaeology from 1968 until 1988, and in 1992 in the Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society. Since then, the focus of the seminar has been widened to include all aspects of the ancient cultures of the Near East and its adjoining regions.

Co-Chairs
Allan S. Gilbert
gilbert@fordham.edu

K. Aslihan Yener
akyener12@gmail.com

Rapporteurs
Kutay Şen
ss5879@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

11/02/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
5:30 PM
High, Middle, or Low? Establishing an absolute radiocarbon chronology for the Middle Bronze Age Levant
Felix Höflmayer, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Abstract

Abstract

In recent years, radiocarbon data from several sites throughout the eastern Mediterranean challenged both the low and the traditional chronology of the Middle Bronze Age Levant and subsequently its correlation with Egypt. The revised chronology demands a critical reassessment of our current view of Egyptian-Levantine relations during the Middle Bronze Age. Textual sources such as the Execration Texts, the Mit Rahina inscription of Amenemhet II, the historical inscription of Khnumhotep at Dahshur, or the Khu-Sobek inscription were interpreted along the lines of the traditional or the low chronology, as were art historical references, such as the Egyptianizing paintings at the Middle Bronze Age fort at Tell el-Burak. This paper summarizes the current state of research in the field of absolute chronology of the Middle Bronze Age Levant and its synchronization with Egypt and presents for the first time a historical interpretation of Egyptian-Levantine relations based on an absolute radiocarbon-backed chronological framework.
11/06/2023 Zoom
12:00 PM
Tree-ring and radiocarbon refinements towards more precise chronology for the Near Eastern Bronze Age
Charlotte Pearson, University of Arizona
Abstract

Abstract

Combining tree-ring records and radiocarbon dating can open new possibilities to enhance chronology, however, discrepancies between radiocarbon dating and historically or archaeologically based chronologies persist. In this talk, we will explore how single year radiocarbon measurements from tree-rings were used to permanently anchor a previously floating tree-ring record from 22 archaeological sites in Turkey and examine the implications of this for dating in Bronze Age central Anatolia. We will also look at the difference that newly proposed refinements to the radiocarbon calibration curve may make to radiocarbon dating across the same time period and consider the limitations and complications of the radiocarbon dating method.
01/17/2024 Zoom
12:00 PM
Post-earthquake response at Alalakh: A World Heritage Initiative at the Bronze Age capital (Hatay, Türkiye)
Murat Akar, (Mustafa Kemal University, Antakya)
Abstract

Abstract

Remnants of the past decay once humans abandon their settlements and cities, and this decomposition forms the archaeological record of Anatolia and the Near East. But as the remains deteriorate, everything that surrounds them changes: landscapes and people. This temporal boundary between past and present is broken when human agency steps in. The contradictory concepts of digging up the past and preserving it form a duality. The very act of unearthing causes an irreversible act that imposes a dilemma upon archaeologists; where and when should they stop digging; what should they preserve and what should they not preserve. This decision-making process is subjective and informed by individual or organizational agendas.

This talk addresses these contradictory concepts by focusing on a tell site that was first explored in the 1930s, then left to decay through environmental and anthropogenic stresses over the last century. This legacy Bronze Age capital city of the Kingdom of Mukish, Alalakh (now called Tell Atchana), located near the Orontes River in the Amuq Valley, is currently under study and reparation by a team of archaeologists, conservators, and cultural heritage specialists to preserve the mud brick monuments that were severely damaged during the February 6th Kahramanmaraş earthquakes.
02/15/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
5:30 PM
CANCELLED--Building bulk: metallurgical network dynamics in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean
Mike Johnson, Chronicle Heritage CRM




03/28/2024 Zoom
12:00 PM
Milking, manure, and meadows: isotopic results from Neolithic Barcın Höyük
Rana Özbal , Koç University, Istanbul
Abstract

Abstract

Located in the Marmara Region of northwest Anatolia, the Neolithic site of Barcın Höyük (6600-6000 BC) provides insights into the lifestyles of the first farmers that migrated from the Neolithic core regions of southwest Asia, including Central Anatolia and North Mesopotamia. The people who settled in regions like the Yenişehir Valley (Bursa), where Barcın Höyük is situated, brought not only their proficiency in pottery-making but also their economic crops and their livestock including sheep, goats, and cattle. This study shows the isotopic results of lipid residue analyses of Barcın pottery coupled with carbon and nitrogen isotope values from bone collagen for Barcın humans and animals in an attempt to reconstruct ancient diets and grazing patterns. Dairying was widely practiced at Barcın Höyük, as evidenced by isotope data, and the ruminants used to produce milk were housed in both manured fields and meadow pastures. This presentation will examine these dietary and grazing-related topics and note how customs and lifestyles changed over the 600-year occupation of Barcın Höyük in the seventh millennium BC.
04/17/2024 Zoom
12:00 PM
Synchronous Eastern Hemisphere societal collapses at 4.2 ka BP
Harvey Weiss, Yale University
Abstract

Abstract

More than fifty high resolution paleoclimate proxies record the 4.2 ka BP northern North Atlantic disruption, an abrupt Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown, coincident with Kuroshio Current disruption in the western Pacific. The concomitant three- or four-phase megadroughts prominently included the ca. 40% reduction of midlatitude westerlies’ precipitation that is documented to decadal resolution in more than one hundred marine, lake sediment, and speleothem cores extending from Spain to Afghanistan. These megadroughts caused the 2200–1900 BC cascading, dry-farming, cereal agro-production crises observable archaeologically in the synchronous adaptive societal collapses, regional abandonments, and refugia habitat tracking and resettlement, from Chalcolithic Iberia to Early Bronze Greece and Levant, Akkadian Empire Mesopotamia and Jiroft, Iran. The 4.2 ka BP Indian Summer Monsoon megadroughts, known from congruent, decadal-precision lake sediment, marine and speleothem cores, forced adaptive abandonment of the five Harappan cities and habitat tracking eastward. The consequent abrupt reduction of monsoon-sourced Nile flow caused Old Kingdom politico-economic collapse, abandonment of delta settlement, and habitat tracking to middle Egypt within First Intermediate Period polities. Simultaneous reduction of the East Asian Summer Monsoon, speleothem and tree ring recorded, forced Longshan settlement collapses at the Yangtze River delta and in the East Haidai regions. In the western hemisphere, disruption of the North American Monsoon generated the 4.2 ka BP megadrought observed from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic, while South American precipitation was disrupted from tropical Andean Ecuador to Lake Titicaca and to southern Chile and Atlantic Brazil. The 4.2 ka BP event’s archaeological and paleoclimate research frontiers remain the quantification of environmental and human settlement variability across dry-farming abandonment and refugia resettlement domains.
05/03/2024 Zoom
12:00 PM
Information revolutions: counting, sealing, writing in Iran BC
Roger Matthews, University of Reading, UK
Abstract

Abstract

Oxford Assyriologist Jacob Dahl once wrote that “writing is invented more times in Iran than in any other place in the world.” In this paper, we address Dahl’s statement through a deep-time perspective on the practices of counting, sealing, and writing in Iran, from earliest times until the end of the Achaemenid empire in 330 BC. We examine the extraordinary ingenuity and complexity of bureaucratic practices in Iran within their socio-political contexts, from Neolithic villages to early states and from rural settlements to imperial capitals.


Amy Richardson , University of Reading, UK