Bronze Age
More general subjects:
Violence and Imagination after the Collapse
Encounters, Identity and Daily Life in the Upper Euphrates Region, 3200-2500 BCE
In the late fourth millennium BCE the villages temples and palace of the Upper Euphrates region stood between two social worlds: the comparatively hierarchical centrally organized Mesopotamian social tradition to the south and the comparatively egalitarian decentralized Kura-Araxes social tradition to the north. Over the next seven centuries this positioning and the interactions it sparked fed into reactions among the region’s inhabitants that ranged from cataclysmic violence to a flowering of innovation in visual culture and social arrangements. These events had a wide array of short-term and long-term impacts some limited to a single house or settlement and some like the innovation of the Warrior Tomb template that transformed societies across West Asia. With an eye towards detail a theoretical approach emphasizing personal motivation and multiple scales of analysis this book organizes previously unpublished data from six sites in the region Arslantepe Ta kun Mevkii Pulur Nor untepe Tepecik and Korucutepe dating to this dramatic and transformative period.
Jebel al-Mutawwaq
A Fourth Millennium bce Village and Dolmen Field. Six Years of Spanish-Italian Excavations (2012–2018)
The Early Bronze Age site of Jebel al-Mutawwaq located on a hill overlooking the Zarqa River in Jordan was a thriving centre of population from the second half of the fourth millennium into the third millennium bce. During this time the settlement developed both in population and social complexity undergoing the beginnings of an urbanization process that fundamentally changed the relationship between this community of the Transjordanian Highlands with the surrounding landscape until it was completely abandoned around 2900 bce. This volume offers a new assessment of the site by combining data from the first surveys of the site under a Spanish team led by J. A. Fernandez-Tresguerres with the new results from six seasons of excavations led by teams from Perugia in Italy and San Esteban in Spain. In doing so this work sheds new light on this walled settlement and its huge megalithic necropolises and offers a fresh understanding of the site.
Hoards from the European Bronze and Iron Ages
Current Research and New Perspectives
Hoards are among the most enigmatic of archaeological finds. The term ‘hoard’ itself has been applied to different assemblages across space and time from the Stone Age into the modern era with an inventory that typically includes artefacts made of valuable raw materials to which significant symbolic meanings can also be assigned. Archaeologists have been trying to understand this phenomenon for much of the last century sometimes emphasizing the universal nature of hoards but more typically focusing on specific regions chronologies and finds. They have for the most part used results derived from typolo-chronological methods. Contemporary archaeology has however developed a broad spectrum of paradigms and methods and hoardresearch in the twenty-first century draws on an increasingly wide range of approaches.This volume presents examples of research that make use of these multi-faceted approaches through a focus on European hoards of metal objects dating to the Bronze and Iron Ages. The contributors to this volume make use of diverse methods among them archaeometallurgical analyses studies of use- and production-wear destruction patterns and landscape archaeology but together their common denominator is the search for a methodological toolkit that will allow researchers to better understand the phenomenon of hoard-deposition more broadly.