Ancient Mesopotamian Urbanism and Blurred Disciplinary Boundaries

Abstract

Most would agree that anthropology needs a degree of consensus and structure and, arguably, of "identity" as well. But as a discipline, its boundaries are blurred, with ongoing negotiations along its changing peripheries. Frontiers with history and the humanities are examples. Other examples are in the biological sciences, other social sciences, and public and academic policy. This article follows the form of a 65-year contextualized semiautobiography juxtaposing difficulties and ambiguities that have long characterized archaeological preoccupation with building models out of recoverable, material evidence alongside philological fidelity to the testimony of early literate records. My substantive field is ancient southern Mesopotamia, where the earliest beginnings of both urbanism and literacy can be traced. The challenge is to move beyond little more than mere coexistence toward better articulating "text" and "context" to form a more truly interdisciplinary dialogue. This approach touches on other individualized choice and behavioral boundaries as well.

Status, kinship, and place of burial at Early Bronze Age Bab adh‐Dhra': A biogeochemical comparison of charnel house human remains

“…In particular, the ways in which these communities organized themselves underwent a fundamental shift as small villages along wadis eventually grew into fortified town sites (Chesson, ; Rast & Schaub, ). While such changes had previously been attributed to processes associated with urbanization, these developments differed considerably from the socioeconomic and political complexity of neighboring urban centers in Mesopotamia and Egypt (Adams, ; Chesson, ). Instead, more nuanced investigations of material culture from the Dead Sea Plain—including those goods deposited with the dead—point to a cultural transformation that was demonstrably entrenched in its own regional history and driven by site‐specific guidelines following localized resource and production histories (Chesson, ; Chesson & Philip, ).…”

Early Urbanism in Northern Mesopotamia

“…Southern Mesopotamia-the alluvial plains of southern Iraq from Baghdad to the Gulf-is persistently identified as the location of the world's earliest cities (Adams 2012;Nissen 1988Nissen , 2001Vallet 1997;van de Mieroop 1997;Yoffee 2015). Studies of the first Mesopotamian cities regularly focus on the site of Uruk, adjacent to the Euphrates River c. 250 km west-northwest of modern Basra (Algaze 2008;Crüsemann 2013;Liverani 2006;Modelski 2003;Nissen 2002).…”

Essential Tensions: A Framework for Exploring Inequality Through Mortuary Archaeology and Bioarchaeology

“…In his discussion of Mesopotamian urbanization, Adams (2012) draws attention to the issue of coherence as a means of evaluating whether the process of urbanization was "revolutionary." Chesson (2015) has expanded on Adam's discussion and provided a definition of coherence as "a synthetic qualitative 'measurement' combining multiple evidentiary lines (e.g., settlement patterns, community scales, economic complexity, social differentiation, political structures) to suggest an overall characterization of a society" (Chesson 2015:58).…”