Postmodernity has a distinctly pre‐apocalyptic feel to it, and this feeling has seeped into archaeology. A review of the scholarship from 2019 attests that archaeologists are having to reckon with present‐day conditions and phenomena as they structure their research, delineate the material world, and affirm archaeology's relevance. Furthermore, these concerns have moved from the realm of the rarely spoken and come to constitute a critical conversation in the field. In a number of respects, the contours of archaeology now hinge upon the discipline's responses to developments in real time, including: How can archaeological knowledge production escape the logistical and epistemological bounds of late capitalism and its failures? Can archaeology contribute to future‐building, and what would that look like? Does archaeology have to be scholar‐activism to achieve the goal of making the past matter (to whom) (for what)? [archaeology, contemporary archaeology, future archaeology, current issues]

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This article, which centers upon the Neo-Assyrian empire of the early first millennium BCE, presents agriculture as a field of political intervention and transformation in the creation of imperial subjectivities. As part of the expansion process into territories of Upper Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian rulers (ca. 900–600 BCE) relied on settled agriculture to produce and promote imperial subjects bound to the authorities for whom they tilled and toiled. However, archaeobotanical data from Tušhan, a provincial capital of the empire, reveals that people under Neo-Assyria’s control did not fully conform to the idealized agrarian lifeways construed by officials to uphold Assyrian power and dictate subject conduct. Evidence for semi-nomadic pastoralism at Tušhan exposes the slippage between ideal agrarian subject and actual agrarian practice in the Neo-Assyrian empire, wherein lies the contestation over politically oriented subjectivities and their instantiation through land-use.

In this paper, political ecology informs a study of agriculture under the Neo‐Assyrian empire. Rather than examining cultivation solely as an economy of subsistence practices, this work considers agrarian laborers, activities, and resources as participants in wider political processes of empire‐building. Both material and discursive manipulations of agriculture are discussed in order to demonstrate the ways in which rulers of Neo‐Assyria instituted agricultural colonization in Upper Mesopotamia for political gain. An archaeobotanical case study from the provincial capital of Tušhan is then presented to provide a closer look at the impact of these agro‐politics on the people and lands in the provinces of the empire. Plant use studies from Tušhan capture the flow of power through agricultural practice, emphasize the Neo‐Assyrian monarchy's rhetorical use of agriculture in strategies of imperialism, and, significantly, reveal the shortcomings of the empire's agrarian program.

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