The Empire In The House, The House In The Empire: Toward A Household Archaeology Perspective On The Assyrian Empire In The Levant

Abstract

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.

Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

“…While some studies exist for New Zealand and Hawai'i, most archipelagos within central East Polynesia have only one or two household studies, often focused on the more central, politically important regions. Studies worldwide have shown that sociopolitical dynamics in hinterlands and areas outside central sociopolitical cores can inform greatly on regional patterns, particularly in testing notions of elite surplus extraction and control, and the extent to which political leaders' power had regional ''reach'' (Buell 2014;Emerson 2012;Herrmann 2011;Hirth 2013;Ossa 2013;Robin 2012). As such, investigating Polynesian commoner households in ''rural'' or hinterland locations far from political centers should shed light on variability in domestic economies, what Brumfiel and Nichols (2009) term ''commodity chains and material flows.''…”

Empire of Conflict, Empire of Compromise

“…Bottom-up adaptation to major shifts in political, economic, and social boundaries could have unpredictable and unintended consequences and affect the long-term continuity of the political system. The addition of household archaeology and other high-resolution studies in provincial settings to the discussion of agency promises to help identify the agents of change in imperial contexts with even greater precision, whether top-down or bottom-up (Herrmann 2011a(Herrmann , 2011b.…”

Tell Jemmeh, Philistia and the Neo-Assyrian Empire during the Late Iron Age

“…It is during this period the 'Pax Assyriaca' is assumed to have taken shape and the term 'Assyrians', when used in texts, becomes a political rather than an ethnic designation (Parpola 2004). Herrmann (2011) after Eisenstadt (1969 has suggested two models for the relationship between the centre of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and its periphery. The first is a rational model, consisting of the drainage of the periphery to the core, i.e.…”