Seminars
The Ancient Near East
Year Founded 1966
Seminar # 479
StatusActive
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.
Chair/s
Allan S. Gilbert
K. Aslihan Yener
Rapporteur/s
Shannon Oliver White
External Website
Meeting Schedule
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Zoom
The Early Bronze Age in the Central Zagros: As Seen from Tapeh Tyalineh
Speaker/s
Shokouh Khosravi, University of Kurdistan, Sanandaj, Iran
Abstract
Situated about 40 km west of Kermanshah in western Iran, Tapeh Tyalineh is a three-hectare site located on the Mahidasht–Kuzaran Plain. Over two excavation seasons, it has yielded a large assemblage of administrative artifacts, including seal impressions, tokens, and a number of seals. The Tyalineh seal-impression assemblage constitutes a new link in the administrative chain of the Central Zagros from the fifth to the second millennium BCE and demonstrates the continuity of ancient exchange-administration practices. Functional analysis indicates that most of the seal impressions were associated with jar sealing and storage — a pattern that points to the site’s focus on the storage, allocation, and exchange of commodities such as oil, wine, or beer. The seal assemblage encompasses all Proto-Elamite glyptic styles as well as examples of Trans-Tigris and Arslantepe styles; it is comparable with major Proto-Elamite sites in Iran, and with Jemdet Nasr and Early Dynastic sites in the Diyala Valley, the Hamrin region, and southern Iraq. These finds fill the gap in administrative evidence from the early third millennium BCE, and provide the first documented evidence for the presence of Proto-Elamite culture and administrative institutions in the western Central Zagros. Tyalineh’s location on the routes linking the northern and southwestern Zagros, as well as on the route between the Central Plateau and Trans-Tigris, is highly significant. The presence of Kura-Araxes and Proto-Elamite pottery along with the impressive scale of administrative activities — beyond the demographic capacity of a small site — reinforces the interpretation that Tapeh Tyalineh was probably a Proto-Elamite outpost. The degree of complexity of Tyalineh’s society in the late fourth millennium BCE remains unknown, however, because several thousand seal impressions were recovered outside primary contexts. Only extensive excavations can answer such questions. Nevertheless, and more broadly, Tapeh Tyalineh provides a suitable context for the study of Proto-Elamite, Jemdet Nasr, and Kura-Araxes interactions in western Iran and sheds light on the role of its inhabitants in the late prehistoric commercial exchanges of the Central Zagros.
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Past Meetings
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The Türkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project: Emerging Themes From a Newly Discovered Urban Center in South-Central Anatolia
Speaker/s
James Osborne, University of Chicago
Michele Massa, Bilkent University, Ankara
Abstract
The site of Türkmen-Karahöyük is a large, multicomponent settlement in the Konya Plain of south-central Anatolia. Located 18 km from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, Türkmen-Karahöyük appears to have been a major political center, at times even the capital city, of the region across the site’s three millennia of occupation, beginning at the start of the Early Bronze Age about 3000 BCE and ending at the Late Hellenistic period approximately 50 BCE. Since excavations began in 2024, the Türkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project (TKAP) has been devoted to illuminating the little-explored south-central Anatolian plateau, which has long been neglected in favor of other regions, such as the northern plateau during the Bronze Age and the coastal regions during the classical era. With a main mound – 30 ha in extent and 35 m tall – surrounded by cemeteries and outer settlements covering a total of 150-200 ha, Türkmen-Karahöyük offers the opportunity for a major corrective to these regional biases. In this talk, we provide an introduction to the site and the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Classical period discoveries made by TKAP in its first three excavation seasons. Several fascinating themes are already emerging from our excavations, including millennia-long continuity in certain domestic household practices, the role of Türkmen-Karahöyük and the Konya Plain in surprisingly distant interregional exchange networks, and the place of the site in a diachronic portrait of human-environment interaction from the Neolithic period to the present.
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The Two Body Problem: What Impressions in the Bitumen Floor of Tomb 7 Tell Us About Stratigraphy, Ritual, and Ontology at Tell Banat in the Third Millennium BCE.
Speaker/s
Anne Porter, Banat Publication Group
Abstract
The unique, stone-built, semi-subterranean tomb (Tomb 7) from the site of Tell Banat on the Middle Euphrates, Syria, presents us with some confounding, yet consequential, problems. The first of these is whether the two locations in the tomb identified as containing human skeletal remains belonged to the same individual who was moved, or to two separate individuals. And if the latter, does this represent the initial stages of a process such as is seen at later Qatna, where one individual was interred as a primary burial then relocated as secondary while another primary inhumation followed in the same spot, or was the secondary burial brought in from outside the tomb? It turns out that solutions may be found in what was not present when the tomb was excavated, as much as what was. The bitumen coating over the baked brick floor of Tomb 7 has preserved traces of materials and activities that deepen not just our understanding of mortuary practices, but also political and social constructs in the third millennium Middle Euphrates. Based on the work of the Banat Publication Group* * Anne Porter and Thomas McClellan with Mohammed Abusaid, Sarah Cavaliere, Patrick Keenan, Zeynep Kusdil, Kat Long-Wright, Raquel Robbins, Jill Weber, and Suzanne Wilhelm
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