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The incorporation of urban communities into larger territorial polities can be studied by various material remains. Here, animal bones from the north lower city of Zincirli Höyük (ancient Samal), Turkey, are used to follow the settlement's shift from a semi-autonomous polity to a Neo-Assyrian province. The results indicate that the process of incorporation is marked by an increasingly specialized animal economy, with non-faunal evidence suggesting that specialization was complemented by an increase in wealth, even among non-elites. Thus, the economy of Samal was gradually incorporated into the larger economic networks of the empire, encouraged by provincial governance that allowed the generated wealth to percolate beyond the immediate governing elites.

The expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire throughout a large part of the Near Eastern world in the ninth to seventh centuries bce is widely considered to have been a transformative epoch in the history of the region, profoundly altering its political and cultural landscape and ushering in an "Age of Empires." The contrasting images of the pax Assyriaca, providing stability and enabling exchange, and of the destructions, deaths, and deportations vividly portrayed in Assyrian royal inscriptions and in the Hebrew Bible both contribute to this picture of sweeping change. In the past few decades, studies of regional settlement patterns in imperial provinces have succeeded in documenting the major demographic shifts brought about by the Assyrian Empire, and the excavation of Assyrian period sites throughout the region has increased dramatically. From the extant archaeological evidence, however, one would still be hard pressed to answer the question of whether and in what ways incorporation into the Assyrian Empire was transformative on the level of provincial subjects' daily social and economic lives, and whether such transformations were imposed from above or emerged from below, despite the fact that this is a crucial element of the prevailing macromodels of imperial rule. Progress toward the resolution of this question will require the contextual and chronological detail offered by household archaeology, as has been demonstrated by several investigations of New World empires. This paper thus advocates a new emphasis on the careful investigation and analysis of ordinary domestic structures in Assyrian imperial provinces, aiming to identify changes and continuities in the domestic economies and social organization of its subjects. Such a program of household archaeology is planned for the new excavations of the University of Chicago at Samʾal (Zincirli Höyük), the capital of a small Syro-Hittite Kingdom that became an Assyrian province in the late eighth century bce.

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