City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia

Steinkeller, Piotr

doi:10.2307/j.ctvdjrqjp.15

Cited by 74 publications

(9 citation statements)

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“…Although third-millennium rural Babylonian sites may be difficult to detect on the surface, Steinkeller (2007) cites textual evidence for substantial rural settlement. The two lines of evidence together can provoke new theoretical discussion.…”

Section: Historical Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

Kowalewski

2008

J Archaeol Res

108

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This is a critical review of regional settlement pattern archaeology published in the last decade. The regional approach proves to be highly productive of new ideas and lasting results. Cultural resource/heritage databases are increasingly important. Notable advances have been made in regional studies of Paleolithic and Holocene foragers, the reciprocal relations between Neolithic communities and their regional societies, and in understanding states and empires. There are new research potentials in comparisons, macroregional analysis, long-term change, and alternative pathways. Research designs should specify systematic coverage at the regional scale and carry out spatial analysis in which social groups are the primary focus.

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Section: Historical Archaeologymentioning

confidence: 98%

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

Kowalewski

2008

J Archaeol Res

108

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“…This situation leaves Uruk, Brak, and other large sites as political and demographic centres; is this enough to confer urban status? In the later third millennium, Mesopotamian cities acted like overgrown villages, or conurbations of villages (Schloen 2001, 197, 287;Steinkeller 2007), and the Mesopotamians themselves used the same word (Sumerian uru, Akkadian ālum) for human settlement of any scale (Van de Mieroop 1997, 10). There are many reasons why qualitative assessments based on scale or demography can be criticized (Cowgill 2004), but in the case of Uruk Mesopotamia, this scale transformation, both of settlements and the households that comprised them, was more than just population growth; it heralded the emergence of a new social form that was greater than the sum of its parts, even if it operated under identical household structural principles.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia

2014

CAJ

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The world's first cities emerged on the plains of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and Syria) in the fourth millennium bc. Attempts to understand this settlement process have assumed revolutionary social change, the disappearance of kinship as a structuring principle, and the appearance of a rational bureaucracy. Most assume cities and state-level social organization were deliberate functional adaptations to meet the goals of elite members of society, or society as a whole. This study proposes an alternative model. By reviewing indigenous terminology from later historical periods, it proposes that urbanism evolved in the context of a metaphorical extension of the household that represented a creative transformation of a familiar structure. The first cities were unintended consequences of this transformation, which may seem ‘revolutionary’ to archaeologists but did not to their inhabitants. This alternative model calls into question the applicability of terms like ‘urbanism’ and ‘the state’ for early Mesopotamian society.

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“…Nor does our knowledge of irrigation regimes at the time suggest vast latifundia on the Roman model of primarily slave-conducted monoculture. Population densities are essentially impossible to estimate with any accuracy from survey data alone, but textual sources fully confirm survey findings of widely scattered smaller settlements as well as large areas within formally defined provincial boundaries given over to unmaintained pasturage and marshland, with diverse natural flora and fauna that were informally exploited outside of state control (Adams 2007(Adams , 2008Steinkeller 2007). A selectively closer approach to that other pattern, with large, wholly state-initiated projects, did make an unambiguous appearance only some 3,000 years later in the Parthian, Sasanian, and early Islamic periods, under circumstances suggesting it may have become a strategic choice of investment made by larger, interregional empires of later periods (Adams 1978(Adams , 2006a.…”

Section: But Were Chiefdoms An Inevitable Intermediate Step?mentioning

confidence: 96%

“…And smaller settlements remained viable in substantial numbers, to judge from textual as well as archaeological sources, for more than another millennium (Adams 2006a,b, pp. 139-42;Steinkeller 2007). Settlements in general could gradually be discerned to lie along networks of interconnected, somewhat canalized watercourses that later began to serve as strategic and economic pathways of intercourse interrupted by intense rivalries and shifts in political control.…”

Section: Social and Natural Systems In Dynamic Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Untitled

2012

Annu. Rev. Anthropol.

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Most would agree that anthropology needs a degree of consensus and structure and, arguably, of "identity" as well. But as a discipline, its boundaries are blurred, with ongoing negotiations along its changing peripheries. Frontiers with history and the humanities are examples. Other examples are in the biological sciences, other social sciences, and public and academic policy. This article follows the form of a 65-year contextualized semiautobiography juxtaposing difficulties and ambiguities that have long characterized archaeological preoccupation with building models out of recoverable, material evidence alongside philological fidelity to the testimony of early literate records. My substantive field is ancient southern Mesopotamia, where the earliest beginnings of both urbanism and literacy can be traced. The challenge is to move beyond little more than mere coexistence toward better articulating "text" and "context" to form a more truly interdisciplinary dialogue. This approach touches on other individualized choice and behavioral boundaries as well.

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City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia

Cited by 74 publications

References 0 publications

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

Regional Settlement Pattern Studies

Households and the Emergence of Cities in Ancient Mesopotamia

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