Mitchell S. Rothman

Early Bronze Age migrants and ethnicity in the Middle Eastern mountain zone

Significance This analysis shows the complex interaction of ethnic groups in antiquity, adapting to new locations and adopting and ultimately, assimilating into a majority culture. It occurs in a background of mountain valleys and highland plains, where ever-shifting populations carve out a living and an identity. The Kura-Araxes cultural tradition existed in the highlands of the South Caucasus from 3500 to 2450 BCE (before the Christian era). This tradition represented an adaptive regime and a symbolically encoded common identity spread over a broad area of patchy mountain environments. By 3000 BCE, groups bearing this identity had migrated southwest across a wide area from the Taurus Mountains down into the southern Levant, southeast along the Zagros Mountains, and north across the Caucasus Mountains. In these new places, they became effectively ethnic groups amid already heterogeneous societies. This paper addresses the place of migrants among local populations as ethnicities and the reasons for their disappearance in the diaspora after 2450 BCE.

Muş in the Early Bronze Age.

In 1991 a crew of American, Canadian, and Turkish researchers began a new and comprehensive survey in the Mus Province of Eastern Turkey. The goal of the survey was to study the evolution of settlement and landuse in a marginal zone at the intersection of four great culture areas of the Middle East: Central Anatolia, Western Iran, the Transcaucasus, and Mesopotamia. This area of Eastern Turkey had been visited previously by I. K. Kokten in 1940s (1947) and Charles Burney in 1950s (1958). Given the large area these surveyors covered and their limited means of transportation, and given the newly excavated material coming from north of the great Taurus mountain massif and from Van (e.g., Sagona 1994, Sagona et al 1992, Cilingiroglu 1987, 1988), a more comprehensive effort appeared warranted. The first season was six weeks in duration. During that time we re-visited 17 of the sites found by Kokten and Burney, and located 11 new sites. A second season was launched in 1993 with the aim of covering areas not surveyed previously (see Figure 1), mostly in the northern foothills and higher elevations near Hamurpet Lake. Unfortunately, conditions did not permit us to do a second season, nor is a season in the very near future likely. We, therefore, will be publishing the results we have already arrived at, aware that our sample is not complete.

Late Chalcolithic Mesopotamia

Greater Mesopotamia is defined as a region by the interactions of people in different subregions over a long period starting certainly by the 8th millennium b.p. In the greater region, however, there is tremendous variability in societal forms, environmental and topographic conditions, resources, and so on. Where possible, sub-regions will be dealt with separately. Region-wide generalizations can be difficult to make.