BERNBECK, REINHARD
(SUNY at Binghamton)
Rules and Realities: Structures of Late Neolithic Painted Ceramics
This paper analyzes the painted patterns of Late Neolithic ceramics from Neolithic sites in the Marv Dasht and the Bakhtiyari Zagros. The ceramic material from many sites exhibits a tendency towards strict structural rules. These rules will be compared across sites, and to the actual realizations on sherds. In this way, I will try to address the question of how decorations on vessels were perceived in the Neolithic. To what extent were they fulfilling some local background aesthetic need, a social marking of identity, an attempt at representing elements of the real world?
BURGER, RICHARD
(Yale University)
Closing Comments
CASANA, JESSE
(University of Arkansas)
Settlement Dynamics and Environmental Degradation in the Northern Levant
Recent archaeological surveys in the Amuq Valley of southern Turkey and surrounding regions of the northern Levant have documented several major transformations in the structure of regional settlement and land use systems, from the Neolithic through the Islamic period. The discovery of hundreds of previously unrecorded archaeological sites and other landscape features such as roads, canals, and field systems has been aided through the analysis of CORONA satellite imagery, in concert with more traditional survey strategies. By closely coordinating archaeological and geomorphological investigations within several discreet drainage basins, it has been possible to spatially and temporally link the progressive changes in human settlement with past episodes of soil erosion. Data have been further integrated within a GIS-based landscape sensitivity model, enabling an exploration of the complex interrelationships among settlement systems, agricultural practices, and climate variability in driving land degradation over time.
CUNNAR, GEOFFREY
(Yale University, PhD Candidate)
The Daily Grind: Using Experimental and Ethnoarchaeology to Understand the Production and Use of Groundstone Tools in Late Neolithic China
A recent Sino-American collaborative excavation has recovered a number of ground and polished stone tools from the Late Neolithic site of Liangchengzhen, Shandong, Peoples Republic of China. The function of stone tools from Shandong Province is usually assigned based on certain morphological characteristics. This paper will present preliminary analytical results of tools from the site of Liangchengzhen and incorporates the use of ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis.
DIEBOLD, BENJAMIN
(Yale University, PhD Candidate)
The Late Neolithic Pottery of the Amuq Plain, southern Turkey
This paper presents recent research into late Neolithic period ceramics of the Amuq Plain, southern Turkey. Recently the subject of a large project conducted by the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, the Amuq is a self-contained and well-watered region, with several large late Neolithic sites, notably Tell Judeidah and Tell Kurdu. Stylistic and chemical analyses suggest that distinctive local cultures here were integrated or subsumed into a regional archaeological culture by the late Ubaid period, though the possibility of a hiatus or population replacement cannot be ruled out. Pastoralists, who were related to some sedentary groups and in conflict with others, must be considered as a conduit of distribution. While ceramics evidently did move around the landscape on an inter-regional basis, at least to a limited extent, that pattern is likely to be the residue of a network of social relations rather than the product of formal exchange between distant communities.
HILL, ANDREW
(Yale University)
Opening Comments: Welcome
HOUSTON, STEPHEN
(Brown University)
On Indus Script: Is it Decipherable?
The writing system of the Indus Valley remains one of the key challenges of archaeological research. To the decipherer will go glory; to scholarship a vital piece of evidence about the nature of Indus civilization. Yet, notably, the script eludes decipherment, despite many attempts to overcome its interpretive challenges. My talk, given in honor of Frank Hole, a man of careful thought and balanced insight, will address the variety of approaches to Indus script and examine why the script remains so difficult to decipher.
KOUCHOUKOS, NICHOLAS
(University of Chicago)
A recursive archaeological landscape model
Rapid development and commercialization of information technology over the past three decades has presented archaeologists and other social scientists with powerful tools for collection, integration, and analysis of large, complex data sets. Known broadly as Database Management Systems (DBMS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), these tools have been developed primarily to facilitate government, business, and military operations. Given this heritage, serious questions surround the suitability of DBMS and GIS for formalizing social scientific observations, which seek a critical, if not objective, perspective on social institutions and their particular rationalities. This paper addresses such questions by evaluating key concepts underlying conventional computer-based approaches to representing, managing, and synthesizing observations of the world. Finding that these concepts provide a weak foundation for social scientific knowledge, the paper develops an alternative model of data and demonstrates its extension to theoretical and methodological problems of spatial analysis. The paper then describes an implementation of this model as a stable, portable, and scalable assemblage of open source software components and discusses its application to the integration, analysis, and publication of strongly heterogeneous data from a century of archaeological research in southwest Asia, much of it collected by Frank Hole.
MCBREATY, SALLY
(University of Connecticut)
A Different Kind of Transition
V. Gordon Childe derived his idea of revolutions in prehistory from the rapid changes that took place in Europe during the Industrial Revolution. His work has left an indelible mark on the study of the Neolithic. Childe’s concept of sudden behavioral change is often used to explain a more ancient event in prehistory, the origin of modern human behavior. Much of the literature emphasizes changes that occurred 40,000 years ago when Homo sapiens is first seen in Europe, at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic period. It has also been suggested that a biological cognitive advance drove the new behaviors whose traces are seen in the archaeological record at this time. Fossil evidence, however, clearly shows that the earliest modern humans, Homo sapiens, appeared in Africa between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago. This leads to the impression that ancient Africans were unable to invent sophisticated items of material culture. In fact, many of the innovations that appear suddenly in Europe 40,000 years ago actually emerge gradually during the African Middle Stone Age, commencing about 300,000 years ago. This suggests a continuous assembling of the package of modern human behaviors in Africa, beginning at the time when the first Homo sapiens appear, and their eventual export to Europe by the first modern human migrants from Africa. The implication is that the earliest Homo sapiens in Africa possessed minds capable of advanced cognition, and that modern human behaviors arose through processes of discovery and invention.
MCCORRISTON, JOY
(Ohio State University)
Society and Environment in Prehistoric Hadramawt, Yemen: Recent Results of the RASA Project
In the five decades that Frank Hole has been practicing archaeology in the Near East, he has led the development of new methodological strategies and new regional sequences from Iran and Syria. Arabia remains an archaeological frontier, due partly to long inaccessibility and to misconceived assumptions about its marginality. New data from the RASA Archaeological Project in Hadramawt, which takes much inspiration from the field methods and theoretical interests of Frank Hole, offer a model for regional landscape history that shows the integral and original role of Arabian foragers in the domestication and spread of Near Eastern agriculture. This paper will discuss the latest results, building upon 5 seasons of field research in Wadi Sana, easternmost of the major drainage basins of the Southern Jol (plateau) of Hadramawt. In the 2005 season, archaeological excavation in Wadi Sana produced new data on a transition from foraging and hunting 7800 years ago (calibrated) to cattle herding about 6800 years ago. By 5300 years ago at the latest, people had begun using the irrigation schemes that were the foundations of Arabia’s later rich civilizations.
POLLOCK, SUSAN
(Binghamton University)
Social Relations in Late Neolithic Fars: “Memory Tools” from Toll-e Bashi
Investigations at Neolithic sites in the southern and western Zagros valleys as well as adjacent lowland and plateau areas have yielded numerous examples of small, enigmatic objects of clay and stone that have been variously called ear plugs, labrets, cosmetic mortars, etc. They have been interpreted as objects of personal adornment, small tools, or gaming pieces. In excavations at the Late Neolithic site of Toll-e Bashi in the Ramjerd Plain of Fars in 2003, large numbers of these items were found. On the basis of a formal and comparative analysis of these objects, I propose that they were used as “memory tools” to materialize and thereby store information. If correct, this interpretation has important implications for changing social relations within and between communities in the Neolithic period.
SACA, IMAN
(Saint Xavier University)
The Endangered Heritage: Doing Archaeology in Today's World
Today the archaeological heritage is at risk in many parts of the developing world due to land use changes, political turmoil and economic instabilities. In these countries, prehistoric as well as historic sites have been destroyed by natural and deliberate desecration--through looting and illicit trade, urban expansion, negligence, and wars. Unless we understand the changes that took place overtime we will not be able to explain the full range of human activities that have taken place in these regions. To counteract this erosion of our human heritage, it is essential to identify, study, document and protect these sites within their specific cultural landscapes, especially in high-risk areas and regions of rapid industrial and urban development.
In order to understand the history of humans in any particular region we need to construct a history of land use over the full range of human occupation. Only when we understand how subsequent land use has altered the landscape can we realistically assess the distribution of archaeological sites and hope to be able to reconstruct the ways people lived on the land in prehistoric and early historic times. Archaeological sites are part of an evolving and dynamic cultural landscape, to study the archeological heritage of any region one needs to recognize the multitude of factors that have shaped and still reshape the archaeological record.
In this presentation I will briefly discuss an attempt to preserve the archaeological heritage in parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as a first step towards accomplishing the larger goal of having a complete archaeological and historical understanding of how humans have used the landscape over the millennia up to our present time. I will also attempt to discuss the challenges that face archaeologists working in the region today mainly: the excavation, preservation and protection of archaeological sites, the growing demands of the tourism industry, and the immediate need for educating and involving the public in the protection of the fragile archaeological heritage of the area.
SCHWARTZ, GLENN M.
(The John Hopkins University)
Mortuary Behaviors and the Emergence of Social Hierarchy in Third Millennium Western Syria
Excavations at Tell Umm el-Marra in western Syria have revealed the existence of an elite mortuary complex in the site center dating to ca. 2500-2200 BC, the period of the earliest states and urban societies in the region. A sequence of tombs and associated sacrificial installations suggests the existence of ruling families whose power and authority were established and legitimized through ostentatious funerary monuments and rituals of ancestor veneration. Political changes and disjunctures in the relevant centuries can be inferred from these data, which reveal the ideological bases for the establishment and maintenance of power in early Syrian states.
STONE, ELIZABETH
(SUNY Stony Brook)
Digital Globe data as a Supplement to Archaeological Survey
High resolution satellite data, such as that available from Ikonos and Digital Globe has mostly been used to document standing monuments. We are developing a project where these data will be used to scan archaeological sites in Iraq for evidence of looting, to allow the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to better deploy their still limited force of antiquities police. A byproduct of this project is the extraordinarily detailed view that these data provide of the Iraqi landscape. In addition to the ancient watercourses which can be seen in lower resolution imagery, even the smallest canals can be seen in the Digital Globe data. Within sites, details of site organization, including in some cases the location of internal canals and harbors, street systems and architectural patterns are clearly visible.
ZEDER, MINDY
(Smithsonian Institute, Museum of Natural History)
A Return to the Zagros: Building on the Legacy of Frank Hole
Early in his career Frank Hole set out to build upon the legacy of Robert Braidwood in tracing the origins of agriculture in the Iranian Zagros. The results of his and Kent Flannery’s survey and excavation of Paleolithic through Neolithic age sites in the high Zagros valleys and its piedmont transformed the current understanding of the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Their work also established important methodological standards for documenting the domestication of plants and animals. The legacy of this path breaking research lives on as new methods for detecting and dating initial domesticates are brought to bear on the collections recovered in these early excavations. This paper presenta results from the reanalysis of collections of animal remains recovered from the Zagros by Hole and Flannery and other researchers working in the Zagros more than 40 years ago.
ZIMANSKY, PAUL
(SUNY Stony Brook)
Reconsiderations of Urartian Cultural Ecology
Complex society to emerged relatively late in eastern Anatolia, and under peculiar environmental and political circumstances. The author put forward an ecological theory for this emergence in Ecology and Empire: The Structure of the Urartian State, which was published (after many delays) in 1985. In the last twenty years, intellectual fashions have changed and new data have emerged to refine the views presented in that work. In particular, the state creation seems to have been subject to distinct phases which were not sufficiently appreciated. This paper will consider the new developments.
