Middle-eastern archaeologists are winning new information from declassified military photographs taken 25 years ago. This study shows how pictures of north-eastern Syria are revealing the routeways, and by inference the agricultural systems of Mesopotamia in the early Bronze Age.

The landscapes of the Near East show both the first settlements and the longest trajectories of settlement systems. Mounding is a characteristic property of these settlement sites, resulting from millennia of continuing settlement activity at distinguished places. So far, however, this defining feature of ancient settlements has not received much attention, or even been the subject of systematic evaluation. We propose a remote sensing approach for comprehensively mapping the pattern of human settlement at large scale and establish the largest archaeological record for a landscape in Mesopotamia, mapping about 14,000 settlement sites-spanning eight millennia-at 15-m resolution in a 23,000-km 2 area in northeastern Syria. To map both low-and high-mounded places-the latter of which are often referred to as "tells"-we develop a strategy for detecting anthrosols in time series of multispectral satellite images and measure the volume of settlement sites in a digital elevation model. Using this volume as a proxy to continued occupation, we find a dependency of the long-term attractiveness of a site on local water availability, but also a strong relation to the relevance within a basin-wide exchange network that we can infer from our record and third millennium B.C. intersite routes visible on the ground until recent times. We believe it is possible to establish a nearly comprehensive map of human settlements in the fluvial plains of northern Mesopotamia and beyond, and site volume may be a key quantity to uncover long-term trends in human settlement activity from such a record.A ssessment of the scale and spatial distribution of human communities in past societies has been a key objective for archaeological research over the last 50 y (1), especially in the Near East, where questions of the origins of urbanism, the state, and empires are almost always approached via a regional perspective (2), and most commonly using the methods of archaeological survey. The pioneering surveys of the 20th century focused on the top of the settlement hierarchy, in the form of the largest mounds (e.g., refs. 3 and 4), but it is now appreciated that by overlooking smaller sites such an approach can produce misleading portraits of settlement systems, particularly those of nonurbanized phases (5). The challenge for archaeologists is to maintain coverage extensive enough to discern significant spatial patterning while increasing survey intensity in order to locate these smaller sites. The first generation of survey archaeologists opted for the former half of this classic tradeoff; more recent generations have increasingly adopted the latter intensive approach.Many surveys have met this challenge by employing various remote sensing datasets. Of the three primary physical properties characterizing sedentary Near Eastern sites since the Neolithicdense surface artifact assemblage, moundedness, and anthropogenic sediments-the latter two can be detected in aerial or satellite imagery and can potentially be recorded at large scale. Indeed, nearly a...

Abstract:The intensification of fieldwork in northern Mesopotamia, the upper region of the TigrisEuphrates basin, has revealed two cycles of expansion and reduction in social complexity between 4400-2000 BC. These cycles include developments in social inequality, political centralization, craft production and economic specialization, agropastoral land use, and urbanization. Contrary to earlier assessments, many of these developments proceeded independently from the polities in southern Mesopotamia, although not in isolation. This review considers recent data from excavations and surveys in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southeastern Turkey with particular attention to how they are used to construct models of early urban polities.Key words: Mesopotamia, complex society, urbanism, collapse 1 IntroductionOver a span of more than two millennia, northern Mesopotamia witnessed the emergence of urban complex society, its collapse and rebirth, and a further episode of collapse. This time span (ca. 4400-2000 BC) has been intensively studied by archaeologists over the last two decades, largely because of twin push (the closure of Iraq to foreign archaeology) and pull (salvage campaigns in advance of dam projects) forces. As a result, what was once considered to be the periphery of early urbanism and state formation in southern Mesopotamia (modern southern Iraq) has emerged as a region of interest in its own right. In many ways we now have a superior understanding of major social developments in the north (e.g., urbanism, craft production, agricultural and pastoral organization, the development of the landscape) than we do for the south, and improvements in chronology have revealed that many aspects of social complexity that were once assumed to have been imported from southern Mesopotamia have earlier and entirely indigenous origins.This review describes the development of social complexity from 4400 BC to the collapse of urban society at the end of the 3rd millennium BC in northern (or upper) Mesopotamia, defined here as the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys and the plains and steppe between them that fall today in northern Iraq, northern Syria, and southeastern Turkey (Fig. 1).Much archaeological research in the region, and in the Near East in general, adopts a culture historical approach that emphasizes typology and the development of sequences of material culture; here the emphasis is on anthropologically oriented research published since 1990.Geographically, the focus is on the river valleys and alluvial plains of Syria, and particularly the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province. Occasionally I refer to sites beyond northern Mesopotamia proper when they are relevant to the discussion, particularly the western Syrian 2 cities of Ebla and Umm al-Marra; the important Syrian city of Mari, on the Euphrates near the Iraqi border, is largely southern Mesopotamian in orientation and will be not be discussed (although see Margueron 2004).In Mesopotamian archaeology generally, social complexity is described throug...

In discussions of the agricultural economies of ancient Mesopotamia, scholars commonly make a sharp distinction between intensive irrigation in the south and extensive rain-fed farming in the north (Weiss 1986; Bagg 2000: 283). In popular as well as academic publications Babylonia is strongly associated with canals, and when one thinks of large state-sponsored initiatives the massive integrated network of canals built by the Sasanian rulers of southern Mesopotamia (Adams 1978) normally springs to mind first. However, since the mid-nineteenth century archaeology and epigraphy have documented the great irrigation schemes of the Neo-Assyrian kings. The inscriptions of Sennacherib in particular refer proudly to his great network of canals, and often describe them in the context of luxurious gardens and parks. The inscriptions make mention of the waters' use for vegetable garden plots and, less frequently, for grain fields above and below Nineveh.

In 2012, the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) conducted its first season of fieldwork. The project's goal is the complete mapping of the archaeological landscape of Erbil, with an emphasis on the Neo-Assyrian and Hellenistic periods. It will test the hypothesis that the Neo-Assyrian landscape was closely planned. This first report emphasizes the project's field methodology, especially the use of a variety of satellite remote sensing imagery. Our preliminary results suggest that the plain was part of the urbanized world of Mesopotamia, with new cities of the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Sasanian era identified. The 2012 EPAS academic team consisted of project director Jason Ur (Harvard University); associate directors Lidewijde de Jong (Groningen University), Jessica Giraud (IFPO Iraq), and James Osborne (Johns Hopkins University); graduate student Max Price (Harvard University); and Erbil Directorate of Antiquities representatives Khalil Barzanji and Gareb Bawamurad. Our driver, translator, and unfailingly joyful companion was Bapir Rashid Bawel. Iraq LXXV (2013) ANCIENT CITIES AND LANDSCAPES IN THE KURDISTAN REGION OF IRAQ 91throughout the Jazira, on the western edges of the imperial core, but it has yet to be demonstrated in the Assyrian heartland. These three elements (planned cities, engineered hydrology, and rural colonization) combine to suggest a highly structured and planned landscape, and constitute the primary settlement model to be tested by EPAS. The survey will, however, investigate settlement and landscape for all periods of human sedentary occupation, from the Neolithic to the present. For example, the Early Bronze Age (third millennium B.C.) was a time of extensive urbanization in surrounding areas of northern Mesopotamia, stretching in an arc from the Sinjar plain, across the Khabur basin, the Harran plain, Sajur Valley, and into western Syria (Stein 2004, Ur 2010a, Matney 2012. In contrast to the hypothesized planned landscape of the Neo-Assyrian period, the highly structured EBA landscape was largely emergent from the actions of individual households, both large and small (Ur 2009, in press). The Erbil plain is a geographical extension of this urban arc, and also falls on the interface between the northern and southern Mesopotamian worlds; the question of whether it participated in this earlier urban phase is an important one.Another avenue of research, closely related to the Assyrian case, is the nature of the post-Assyrian landscape, and particularly how the Erbil plain fits into the larger Hellenistic and Parthian-Roman world. The establishment of colonies by Alexander and his Seleucid successors and the creation of two new capital centres, at Antioch on the Orontes and Seleucia on the Tigris, represent two major changes in the character of urbanization. Colonization was not restricted to the towns but also spread to the surrounding countryside, where newcomers tilled the land. A contingent of Greek-Macedonian colonists likely settled at Nineveh (Oates 1968), but little else is known ab...