Building Walls, Social Groups and Empires: A Study of Political Power and Compliance in the Neo-Assyrian Period

Lorenzon, Marta; Wallis, Caroline

doi:10.36253/asiana-1545

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…There are various forms of forced labour in Assyria, from Assyrian citizens completing their mandatory state duty (iklu) to the thousands of deportees, people displaced from their own land by war and conquest (Lorenzon & Wallis 2023). And while these people are often rendered invisible, we get some glimpses of resistance from texts.…”

Section: Vanuatu: Chiefs Against Centralizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy

Politopoulos,

Frieman,

Flexner

et al. 2024

CAJ

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Scholars of the past frame the ‘origins’ or evolution of inequality, usually using archaeological or anthropological evidence as a basis for their arguments, as an intentional, inevitable, important step towards the development of states, implicitly framed as the pinnacle of human political and economic achievement. Anarchist archaeologies reject the idea of hierarchy as a positive or inevitable evolutionary outcome underlying the path to civilization. We argue instead for a radical reorientation towards archaeologies of equality. We propose a prefigurative archaeology that celebrates the myriad ways that human beings have actively undermined and resisted hierarchical social arrangements. We aim to reorient archaeology's focus towards societies that purposefully prevented or constrained the emergence of inequality. To demonstrate the potential of archaeologies of equality we present case examples from Oceania, Britain, West Asia and the American Southwest. Highlighting the accomplishments of societies of equals in the past demonstrates the contingency and problematic nature of present forms of inequality. It allows us to explore a different set of pasts and thus enact different presents as we imagine different futures.

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Section: Vanuatu: Chiefs Against Centralizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy

Politopoulos,

Frieman,

Flexner

et al. 2024

CAJ

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“…The establishment of a settlement for a complex society involves various actors in numerous building projects including the construction of monumental architectural features and public structures, which are associated with political, defensive, and economic institutions (Lorenzon & Wallis, 2022). Among these actors, local communities and craftsmen stand out.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Masters of mudbrick: Geoarchaeological analysis of Iron Age earthen public buildings at Ashdod‐Yam (Israel)

Lorenzon,

Cutillas‐Victoria,

Itkin

et al. 2023

Geoarchaeology

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Excavations at Ashdod‐Yam exposed a fortification system that features a massive mudbrick wall with large earthen ramparts laid on either side. This fortified horseshoe‐shaped enclosure once surrounded what was likely a human‐made harbor and an adjacent acropolis with complex earthen architecture, constructed and active during Iron Age IIB–C (eighth–seventh centuries B.C.E.). These Iron Age public structures are at the center of the current research. In this paper, we present the geoarchaeological analyses of Ashdod‐Yam's earthen architecture. We applied a multidisciplinary methodology to new evidence for mudbrick manufacture with the goal of understanding the relationship between governing bodies and craftsmen. The analyses combine X‐ray fluorescence, loss on ignition, environmental scanning electron microscopy, and thin‐section petrography to investigate raw material procurement, manufacturing choices, and labor organization at Ashdod‐Yam during Iron IIB–C. Construction techniques and the standardization of the mudbrick recipe point to a local enterprise regarding the site's public earthen architecture. Furthermore, the degree of labor organization must have been closely observed and supervised by a central political power. Thus, it is argued here that construction and maintenance of the site was carried out by the kingdom of Ashdod, either as a part of its own local initiative or on behalf of the Neo‐Assyrian empire.

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Social group identities and semantic domains in the ancient Near East

Lindén,

Svärd,

Alstola

et al. 2024

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities

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Digital Humanities has an increasing need for widely applicable and easy-to-use methods across disciplinary boundaries. We believe that the cross-disciplinary methods we have developed for the study of the ancient Near East are useful for the study of other research questions outside the field of “Digital Assyriology”. The article presents an overview of automated language processing for lexical-semantic analysis, social network analysis, and content analysis. We draw on the work in our research group, which aims to address how changing empires affect social group identities and lifeways in the first millennium BCE in Mesopotamia. The article places the methods our research team has developed into the larger methodological context of Digital Humanities (DH). The article presents an overview of the tools our research group has found useful in our study of ancient social groups. Sections 1 and 2 give the necessary background for the reader to understand the particular challenges related to the study of ancient Mesopotamia and how we have overcome them. The concrete case studies presented in Sections 3 and 4, however, are kept as general as possible, to facilitate similar approaches in adjacent fields of study. Our methodology and approaches are well documented and openly available, and in our view can be used on similar text materials, by other groups interested in DH approaches.

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Building Walls, Social Groups and Empires: A Study of Political Power and Compliance in the Neo-Assyrian Period

Cited by 3 publications

References 35 publications

An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy

An Anarchist Archaeology of Equality: Pasts and Futures Against Hierarchy

Masters of mudbrick: Geoarchaeological analysis of Iron Age earthen public buildings at Ashdod‐Yam (Israel)

Social group identities and semantic domains in the ancient Near East

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