Surface collection and offsite studies at Tell Hamoukar, 1999

Abstract

The new program of excavations of the Syrian-American Expedition to Tell Hamoukar, Hassake province, northeastern Syria, began with an initial season in Fall 1999. The project includes among its goals the study of the expansion and contraction of settlement on the site, as well as the relationship of the urbanization process on Hamoukar to regional settlement trends. Our initial step was to document the chronology and scale of this process through a controlled surface collection on Tell Hamoukar itself. In addition, we made some initial attempts at documenting the archaeological landscape near the site by recording traces of ancient roads (hollow ways) and making controlled collection of field scatters.

Site maintenance practices and settlement social organization in Iron Age Karnataka, India: Inferring settlement places and landscape from surface distributions of ceramic assemblage attributes

“…I employ the attribute artifact mass as my primary formal unit of analysis to document the distribution of differential densities of artifacts (cf. Lycett, 1995;Killion et al, 1989;Morrison, 1990;Smyth, 1998;Ur, 2002;Wandsnider, 1996). By employing artifact mass I have generated three initial structural descriptors of assemblage variation within aggregate samples from surface collection units.…”

Early Urbanism in Northern Mesopotamia

“…The two best-known cities of northeastern Syria, Tell Brak and Tell Hamoukar, have been partly identified as such through site survey. Structured surface collections of both sites used the same methodology of grids 100 m per side, within which squares of 10 x 10 m were intensively collected (Ur 2002b(Ur , 2010bUr et al 2011). Based on less structured survey and excavations, additional LC2-3 urban settlements include Tell al-Hawa, Grai Resh, and, possibly, Nineveh, Tell Leilan, and Tell Mozan.…”