Seminars

Some of the attractions of silver are obvious, but what is particularly intriguing is the way in which it became and remained deeply embedded in the economies and cultures of the Old World (and subsequently a wider, global world) during the last six millennia. Although we can see extremely sporadic use of probably native silver in the western Old World as early as the 6th millennium BC, silver does not make a determined appearance until the 4th millennium. In the earlier part of this millennium, there is evidence of the use of silver in Iran, Mesopotamia, southeast Anatolia, and the north Caucasus, and by the end of the millennium it can also be seen in the Levant, Egypt, the Pontic region, the Balkans, and the Aegean. Over the course of the millennium, there is evidence of its cupellation from silver-rich lead ores in Iran, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, southeast Anatolia, and the Aegean, and it is assumed (though cannot be proven) that most, if not all, of the silver deployed in these and surrounding areas was obtained by the process of cupellation. Opinions differ as to whether or not this process was discovered independently in a number of different regions, and I shall try to navigate through some of the arguments and uncertainties surrounding such disparate views.

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.

The results of the 2005–2019 excavations at the Middle Bronze Age palace and site of Tel Kabri suggest a need for a reevaluation of Canaanite urbanization and rulership. Urbanization in the MBA (ca. 1950–1550 BCE) southern Levant is thought to be a secondary, peripheral phenomenon influenced by the Syro-Mesopotamian “core.” However, our research has shown that the Kabri elite in their vast palace demonstrated no evidence of the command economy prevalent in the Ancient Near East. Furthermore, while previous research attention was given to urbanization and its manifestation in fortifications, monumental architecture, and international trade, pastoralists and mobile groups in the MBA have not been investigated using available scientific archaeological methods. We hypothesize here, based on data from Tel Kabri and other sites, that the phenomenon of the MBA “hollow cities” was the outcome of a local trajectory to urbanization and rulership, which involved the inclusion of pastoral components in cities, increasing the resilience of the polity. The inner, empty part of the area enclosed by walls became a “pastoral landscape” of ancestral tombs, animal pens, and water sources for the use of the mobile population, while other parts of the site included domestic structures inhabited by a more sedentary population.

Previous and ongoing archaeological research in southern Anatolia by various scholars has provided a substantial archaeological foundation accompanied by a fine-tuned stratigraphy and chronologies. The knowledge collected from southern Anatolia has become a ‘game changer’ in the assessment of interactions in the Eastern Mediterranean. This lecture presents an overview of those interactions between Cyprus and the southern coast of Anatolia in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, which is a period of globalization with interregional connections by both land and sea routes. Pottery studies play a crucial role in this overall analysis as ceramics are better preserved than other materials, such as textiles and metals. In this way, Middle and Late Cypriot pottery in southern Anatolia and Red Lustrous Wheel-made Ware in Cyprus have become the relevant analytical keys that have also been supported by archaeometry. Furthermore, this lecture will attempt to integrate the study of pottery circulation between the two coasts of Cyprus and Anatolia with the archaeological, geographical, and historical background.

This talk summarizes my recent project to open the study of the distant sciences of Mesopotamia to a cultural approach interested in diverse ways of worldmaking and historical ontologies, and thus to add the anthropology of science to existing methodologies of history and sociology of science for pre-modern contexts.

By developing specific methods for transposing their knowledge and passing it on to the next generations, Mesopotamian scribes and scholars left us a richly instructive legacy. The lexical lists that appeared during the 3rd millennium BC are the first evidence of this written transmission of knowledge. At the beginning of the 2nd millennium, the ruling classes set up a real learning system, developing several didactic tools to teach a language, Sumerian, that had by then disappeared, even though their mother tongue was Akkadian. Thousands of school exercises dating from this period have been discovered throughout the Near East, from southern Mesopotamia to Syria and Iran. The aim of the lecture is to show that their teaching system was not so far removed from our own if we use the concept of schooling (forme scolaire in French) borrowed from the field of the history of educational sciences in describing their practices.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.