Tony J. Wilkinson

Grand challenges for archaeology

Abstract This article represents a systematic effort to answer the question, What are archaeology’s most important scientific challenges? Starting with a crowd-sourced query directed broadly to the professional community of archaeologists, the authors augmented, prioritized, and refined the responses during a two-day workshop focused specifically on this question. The resulting 25 “grand challenges” focus on dynamic cultural processes and the operation of coupled human and natural systems. We organize these challenges into five topics: (1) emergence, communities, and complexity; (2) resilience, persistence, transformation, and collapse; (3) movement, mobility, and migration; (4) cognition, behavior, and identity; and (5) human-environment interactions. A discussion and a brief list of references accompany each question. An important goal in identifying these challenges is to inform decisions on infrastructure investments for archaeology. Our premise is that the highest priority investments should enable us to address the most important questions. Addressing many of these challenges will require both sophisticated modeling and large-scale synthetic research that are only now becoming possible. Although new archaeological fieldwork will be essential, the greatest pay off will derive from investments that provide sophisticated research access to the explosion in systematically collected archaeological data that has occurred over the last several decades.

Using Shuttle Radar Topography to map ancient water channels in Mesopotamia

The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) is currently producing a digital elevation model of most of the worlds surface. Here the authors assess its value in mapping and sequencing the network of water channels that provided the arterial system for Mesopotamia before the petrol engine.

Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age Landscapes of Settlement and Mobility in the Middle Euphrates: A Reassessment

Abstract Urbanization occupies an ambiguous position in the development of the Middle Euphrates region of Turkey and Syria, in part because the area frequently formed a contested region between other stronger Early Bronze Age polities. This paper aims to review evidence from a series of archaeological surveys to illustrate trends in settlement during the 4th and 3rd millennium BC. Re-analysis of survey data from three exemplar regions in the Middle Euphrates demonstrates that by including settlement away from the main Euphrates Valley we get a picture of two main zones of settlement corresponding to agro-ecological zones. In the northern zone, settlements underwent phases of nucleation and dispersal through time, but long-term configurations were relatively stable. In contrast, a southern zone, south of the Sajur Valley, was characterized by rapid colonization and some degree of boom and bust growth of towns, perhaps encouraged by the opportunities afforded by the high risk but high rewards of the ‘zone of uncertainty’. Although ecological conditions and climate change played a role in settlement growth and failure, in part by setting the parameters for agro-pastoral production, it is evident that socio-political circumstances, chronic conflict and sheer opportunism were probably key to both the growth and decline of the southern settlements.

Environment and Long-Term Population Trends in Southwest Arabia

Any paper that claims to present long term population trends of Arabia or any part of it has to face the fact that demographic data is, at best, limited. Nevertheless, that southwest Arabia is a very well populated area today, and may have been so during parts of prehistory needs to be explored. This chapter therefore focuses primarily on emerging archaeological evidence that suggests that this little known, but verdant and agriculturally productive region was during much of the Holocene a significant population center. How far such a model can be projected back in time (for example back into the Paleolithic) is difficult to say, but by laying out the evidence for climatic and population cycles during the past 10,000 years or so it should be possible to suggest what might have prevailed during those earlier periods, and more importantly to seek the relevant evidence for such occupations. It is not the aim of this chapter to present a full and detailed synthesis of the archaeological sites in southwest Arabia; regional syntheses can be found in Breton (1999), Cleuziou and Tosi (1998), Durrani (Durrani (2005), Edens and Wilkinson (1998), and de Maigret (2002).

Empire and Environment in the Northern Fertile Crescent

Because of their huge size, empires are daunting for archaeological study. Although some features of early Near Eastern empires have been studied since the very earliest trenches were sunk into the Assyrian capital cities of Nimrud and Nineveh (Fig. 9.1), the implications of the development of territorial empires have not been fully absorbed into the study of human-environment relations. The later territorial empires of the first millennium BC and AD fundamentally changed the landscapes of the Near East in ways that did not previously obtain. For example, features of monumental scale (which are often associated with empires), and which include huge canal systems such as those of the Sasanians, necessarily had massive impacts on the environment, but more widespread, and ultimately perhaps more significant in terms of human impacts on the environment, are the smaller scale features that are often under-represented by archaeologists. This chapter relates the signatures of the cultural landscapes of the later territorial empires of the Near East to the local environment and landscape degradation.

First season of Syrian-American investigations at Hamoukar, Hasekeh Province

Introduction In 1999, the joint expedition of the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago initiated excavations and surface reconnaissance at the site of Tell Hamoukar in the northeastern corner of Hassekeh Province (Figs. 1-2). We need to acknowledge, with gratitude, the help and encouragement rendered by Dr Sultan Muhesen, then Director General of Antiquities, and by Sayyid Abdul Messieh Bagdo, of the Antiquities office in Hassekeh. McGuire Gibson arrived in Damascus on August 24, 1999 and began to implement logistical arrangements with the co-director, Muhammad Maktash. Actual excavation of the site of Hamoukar began on September 9 and ended on October 31. Hamoukar has been a subject of interest to a number of scholars through the years because of its size and surface pottery, which includes southern Uruk IV types. The presence of even earlier 4th millennium local Late Chalcolithic pottery as well as Ninevite V and mid-3rd millennium types makes the site crucial in addressing a number of important questions. The complexity of settlement in the early 4th millennium, the nature of the Late Uruk occupation and its relation to other sites with similar material in Syria and Turkey, and the history of the site in the Akkadian and post-Akkadian periods can all be elucidated by excavation here. The location of the site is unusual, in that it is not directly on one of the feeders of the Khabur, and determining the source for its water was one of the first issues for the expedition. Its position