Journal of Urban Archaeology

The initial archaeological work (2001– 2018) in the densely populated modern Çukurbağ neighbourhood of İzmit (ancient Nicomedia) in Türkiye uncovered a Tetrarchic imperial complex’s Aula, adorned with numerous sculptures and painted marble reliefs — known as the Nicomedia frieze — featuring imperial and agonistic depictions. The 2022 excavations, following the expropriation and demolition of a modern house at the site, have exposed more aspects of this imperial Aula, its architecture, decoration, and its subsequent reuse. Among the 2022 finds are new relief pieces of the Nicomedia frieze depicting imperial and agonistic scenes. Traditional excavation techniques combined with advanced remote-sensing technologies such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Electric Resistivity Tomography (ERT) proved particularly effective in the urban setting of the recent research. This article introduces the newly discovered fragments of the Nicomedia frieze, including a large relief panel that features the first known depiction of the hippodrome of Nicomedia. By drawing comparisons with other known hippodrome-palace complexes of the Tetrarchic imperial centres across the Roman Empire, this study also proposes a possible location for the early fourth-century hippodrome of Nicomedia; adjacent to the imperial palace and inside the eastern section of the ancient city walls.

In recent years, an increase in studies on settlement archaeology, households, cities, and urban patterns in Sudan, especially the period of the second millennium bc, is notable. These new studies include fieldwork as well as the reassessment of past excavations and archival material. Using a new digital, photorealistic, on-the-ground approach, this article presents the reinvestigation of a specific residential complex in Sai City in New Kingdom Nubia (modern Sudan). The previous reconstruction of this area based on 3D scans is challenged, and we suggest the presence of animal pens of a form that is, remarkably, only otherwise attested for ancient Egypt in the city of Amarna. Our reinterpretation of the adjacent building demonstrates that it was a traditional villa, paralleling those known from Amarna. Together, the villa and animal- pen area formed an enclosed estate that again finds strong parallels at Amarna, providing the opportunity to discuss aspects of ‘Egypt in microcosm’ beyond Egypt’s borders.

The earliest of ancient cities developed an urban morphology with a capacity to sustain intensive urban public life for dense and heterogeneous populations. The Indus city of Mohenjo- Daro (2600–1900 bc) is one of the earliest cities for which we have detailed evidence of the street and laneway morphologies of everyday urban life. Merging archaeology with urban design theory, an innovative mapping reveals the spatial logic and generative forces that produced this public access network and its ‘commons’. While often regarded as a ‘planned’ city, this was an informal, adaptive, and experimental process of inventing an urban morphology that could enable and sustain the energized crowding at the heart of urban life, yet also manage the stresses of everyday face-to-face encounter with strangers. This contributes to debates about relations between planned and unplanned cities, between cities and states, and between cities and urbanity.

Sanctuaries for Asklepios, the Greek god of healing, were in some cases powerful urban microcosms that played important roles in establishing and maintaining socio-political hierarchies through material culture. This article focuses specifically on the representations of families at the Asklepieia of Epidauros and Pergamon during the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial period (c. 300 bc–ad 200) from the perspective of object agency. These sacred spaces were embedded with family narratives represented through material culture, from private to public dedications, decrees, and architecture, evoking sociopolitical messages to later audiences. As they accumulated over generations, they produced a timescape that would have been of vital importance to the preservation of the social structures of the city. Despite their locations outside the urban core, these Asklepieia served as important focal points in projecting urban cohesion and creating and maintaining social relations on an urban level.

In the Neotropics, warm and humid environments presented challenges and opportunities for the emergence and persistence of premodern cities that were different from those in semiarid environments. We suggest that these properties contributed to shaping distinct developmental pathways for urban systems. In the warm/wet Neotropics, greater intraspecies distancing, heightened difficulties with organic storage, and increased incidence of communicable diseases conditioned the predictability of food access, thereby structuring economic relationships dissimilar in degree from those in semiarid environs. We further propose that wealth concentrations and socio-economic disparities in semiarid settings, where ecological turnovers are relatively slow, were amplified compared to warm/wet environments with more rapid turnovers. We substantiate this claim by contrasting two of the most well-reported pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cities and their respective sustaining areas: Teotihuacán in the semiarid Basin of Mexico and Tikal in the humid Central Maya Lowlands of northern Guatemala. We assess the disparities between these cities focusing on (1) settlement patterns, (2) the development of infrastructures supporting basic metabolic needs, (3) demographic growth rate profiles, (4) the interplay between prestige and subsistence economies, (5) synchronous distribution and intergenerational accumulation of wealth, and (6) the character of urban governance institutions. We conclude that biophysical environments fundamentally matter in assessing cultural identities and behaviours of premodern cities and their regional support populations through time.

This special issue is concerned with how urban archaeology, political control, and colonialism were intertwined in Egypt and the Near East through specific case studies. By focusing on the work of Western scholars in the Near East and Egypt in the late Ottoman and the Mandate periods, we examine how their preferences (and biases) have shaped the field and have left persistent legacies that are still in need of untangling. What the articles share is a critical re-examination of archival sources (legacy data), both published and unpublished, which allows the authors to present nuanced narratives about the urban archaeology of the region, and to open up avenues for further research.

This article examines the complex and often fragmented nature of archaeological archives through four case studies: the Istanbul Archaeological Museum; the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin; the Gerasa excavation archives at Yale University; and the Ingholt Archives. These case studies highlight key issues surrounding accessibility, archival organization, digitization, and the role of museums in shaping excavation narratives. The paper situates these archives within their colonial and institutional contexts, emphasizing how administrative policies, geopolitical boundaries, and curatorial decisions influence their structure and availability. It explores the challenges posed by archival dispersion, inconsistent cataloguing, and the selective processes of documentation that shape archaeological knowledge. Additionally, the study critically assesses the impact of digitization, noting both its potential for broader access and its limitations in metadata management and decolonization efforts. Museums, as both collectors and curators of archaeological material, play a crucial role in shaping archival narratives, often reinforcing Western archival standards that can obscure original contexts. By analysing the histories and contemporary functions of these archives, this paper underscores the necessity of re-evaluating archival frameworks to enhance accessibility, foster critical engagement, and develop more inclusive approaches to archaeological knowledge production.

This article examines reconstruction processes of knowledge concerning some of the ‘lost cities’ of Western Asia, using Palmyra and Samarra, two prominent urban sites as case studies. These cities offer distinct insights into how early explorations by Western travellers and antiquarians, and archaeological practices under different political regimes have shaped the narratives about their urban histories, and how their practices continue to influence contemporary understandings of these cities in modern scholarly thought. By examining archaeological and historical literature, archival research, and excavation documentation on these cities, this article reveals in which ways research has given more attention to certain historical periods while marginalizing — consciously or not — others.

Avec la création du Service des Antiquités sous le Mandat français en Syrie, la recherche archéologique a connu des transformations radicales dans plusieurs domaines. L’étude de l’urbanisme a débuté timidement grâce aux travaux de Léonce Brossé et de Robert du Mesnil du Buisson. Plus tard, suite aux travaux de Jean Sauvaget, l’urbanisme des villes classiques et islamiques a atteint un sommet de précision grâce à une vision approfondie combinant observation de terrain, aspects socio-économiques et localisation géographique.

In this article, we investigate aspects of how Palmyra was explored scientifically in the 1920s. Through publications and material in the so-called Ingholt Archive, it is possible to investigate different stakeholders and how they understood the urban past and their contemporary understanding of Tadmor/Palmyra. The first is the French Mandate Antiquities Service, under whose control the village of Tadmor with the ruins of Palmyra was. The second is Harald Ingholt himself. The third, and crucially important, but also least represented and practically voiceless in our sources, is the local population of Tadmor.

This article examines the role of archive archaeology in shaping theoretical and conceptual approaches to urban archaeology, using Seleucia in Pieria as a case study. The authors challenge the perception of Seleucia as a ‘second’ city, which, while compounded by the lack of later archaeological focus, has its roots in early European travellers’ accounts of the site. By examining Seleucia, not as a suburb or outpost of Antioch, as it is often treated, but as a distinct urban context, this article seeks to further complicate hierarchical approaches to the study of urban centres. By exploring European travel writing from the Ottoman period, excavation reports from Mandate-era work, and modern evaluations, we highlight the role of historiography in examining sites with minimal previous analysis and in contemporary understandings of urbanity.

The excavations conducted at Gerasa, in modern Jordan, in the 1920s and 1930s, first by an American-British team and later by an exclusively American team, produced some of the most important results on Roman urbanism in the Near East. These publications, mainly printed in the volume edited by C. H. Kraeling and published in 1938, remain standard works to this day. However, the excavation’s directors were also selective about what they published in this volume or at all. This article explores some of the archival material related to the 1931 spring campaign, now held at the Yale University Art Gallery in the archives, and illuminates a variety of aspects of the excavation that were not included in publication.

Alexandria’s urban planning, like that of Athens, Constantinople, and Rome, has been researched and mapped since the eighteenth century. The excavation operation carried out between 1864 and 1866, revolutionary in the history of archaeology both for its date and for the Egyptian nationality of its author, Mahmud el-Falaki, also revolutionized thinking on the city’s urban history. But its denigration by British archaeologists, led by David G. Hogarth, and by the first two Italian directors of the Graeco-Roman Museum, Giuseppe Botti and Evaristo Breccia, led to a backlash. Their successor, Achille Adriani, adopted a new topographical approach aimed at precisely locating data from earlier excavations and attempted to extract chronological information from them.