AE0201 S02 Problems in Archaeology

Architecture, Body and Performance in the Ancient Near Eastern World

Artemis A.W. and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World Brown University Fall 2006

S y l l a b u s

Meets Fridays 3:00-5:20 pm (the so-called O-hour) in Joukowsky Institute Seminar Room 203 Instructor: Ömür Harmansah (Visiting Assistant Professor) Office Hours: Tuesday 10-12 am. (By appointment) Office: Joukowsky Institute (70 Waterman St.) Room 202 E-mail: [email protected] Tel: 401-863-6411

Course Description This seminar investigates the relationship between bodily practices, social performances and production of space, using case studies drawn from ancient Mesopotamia, and . Employing contemporary critical theories on the body, materiality and social practices, new theories of the making of architectural spaces and landscapes will be explored with respect to multiple geographical, historical contexts in the Ancient Near .

Contemporary discourses on body and performance in cultural studies and social theory have flourished drastically in the last two decades and continue to offer new avenues of research in the social sciences and the humanities. In this seminar, our goal is, on the one hand, to explore these new theoretical writings on embodiment, agency, subjectivity, bodily practices, social performances, spectacles, materiality and spatiality of body. On the other hand, we will review recent archaeological work, historical and literary sources from the ancient Near East, and consider their scholarly interpretations influenced by contemporary discourses. Our task remains to be posing new research questions to the material culture of the ancient Near Eastern world in the light of our theoretical readings and attempt to device alternative approaches in understanding this corpus of archaeological evidence. Reflexively, we will consider how Near Eastern case studies can be used to critique overarching theories of the body, performance and material culture.

Practicalities Meeting schedule, reserves, WebCT etc. • The readings on reserve are frequently digital and can be downloaded through OCRA Brown Library’s Online Course Reserves Access webpage is: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/reserves/). The course password is akitu. • A wiki is created for this course and we will use this site interactively for out-of-class discussions, posting of announcements, assignments, and the like. Every student registered or auditing this course will have access to editing this page. Yes, you can freely edit the site, post your own work, make comments to your colleagues’ and professor’s postings. Our extensive use of this site will be mostly running forums on the Friday discussions. You will 1 be asked to post all your written assignments on the wiki (but you also have the option of not doing so, and using the traditional format of submitting hard copies to Ömür). Please familiarize yourself with the wiki, and make sure to check the site regularly, at least before each class meeting. Here is the wiki-site: http://metamedia.stanford.edu/projects/architecturebodyperformance/Home • A WebCT site has also been created for this course and may be used occasionally during the semester for the posting of images and the like. You can access WebCT by logging in at: https://mycourses.brown.edu/webct/logonDisplay.dowebct

Book available at Brown Bookstore You are strongly recommended (but not required) to buy the following book now available at the bookstore. Over the course of the semester, we will try to read the entirity of this book. Remember that there is also a copy on reserve at the Rock. The book is also available online to Brown students: http://library.brown.edu:80/record=b4017045

• Bahrani, Zainab; 2001. Women of Babylon: gender and representation. London and New York: Routledge.

Course Requirements Students are expected to do weekly readings regularly and comprehensively, and contribute to seminar discussions. They will be occasionally asked to volunteer for short presentations in class on selected articles, topics or a specific body of archaeological/textual material. In the first half of the semester, the written tasks will involve a series of brief response papers in relation to our theoretical discussions during the seminars. In the second half, students will focus on their research project. There will be no exams. Grading will be based on class participation (30%), class presentations (10%), response papers (20%), research project (40%).

Research project Students will choose a research topic in collaboration with the instructor and turn it into a project. The project should involve an analytical and critical discussion of a theoretical approach and its application to an archaeological case study, relevant to our seminar discussions on body, performance and architectural space. The main aim in the research project is the bridge the apparent gap between theoretical discussions in archaeology and the material evidence. The research project’s presentations will include a 15- 20 min class presentation of the project, a 4-5 page draft (to be submitted on the day of the presentation) and a 12-20 page final paper.

Weekly Schedule

Week 1: Sept. 8. Introduction: scope of the course, methods. Excerpt from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Medea. Ustad Siyahkalem’s miniatures.

Week 2: Sept. 15. Body in recent critical/social theory: post-Cartesian approaches to being, phenomenological responses to the mind and body split in the post-industrial West. Case study: recent interpretations of palaeolithic rock art: shamanism, body, performance. Readings:

2 Shilling, Chris; 2005. “Introduction” ad “Contemporary bodies” in Body in culture, technology and . London: Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 1-23 and 47-72. Turner, Bryan S.; 2000. “An outline of a general sociology of the body,” in The Blackwell companion to social theory. Bryan S. Turner (ed.). Second edition. Malden MA: Blackwell, 481-502. Mauss, Marcel; 1973 (1935). “Techniques of the body,” Economy and society 2: 1-34. Lewis-Williams, J. David; 2001. “South African shamanistic rock art in its social and cognitive contexts,” in Archaeology of shamanism. Niel S. Price (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 17-39. Ouzman, Sven; 2001. “Seeing is deceiving: rock art and the non-visual,” World Archaeology 33: 237-256.

Optional: Layton, Robert; 2000. “Shamanism, totemism and rock art: Les Chamanes de la Prehistoire in the context of Rock art research,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10/1:169-186.

Week 3: Sept. 22. Body and the archaeological discourse: embodied subjectivities. The concepts of the body in the Neolithic Near East. Presentation topic: Ain-Ghazal- Pre-pottery Neolithic B Period pit of plaster human figures. Readings: Joyce, Rosemary; 2005. “Archaeology of the body,” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 139-158. Hodder, Ian and Scott Hutson; 2003. “Embodied archaeology,” in Reading the past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 106-124. Meskell, Lynn M. 1996: “The somatisation of archaeology: institutions, discourses, corporeality,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 29(1): 1-16. Sofaer, Joanna R.; 2006. “Body as an archaeological resource,” in Body as material culture: a theoretical osteoarchaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 12-30. Kuijt, Ian and Meredith S. Chesson; 2005. “Lumps of clay and pieces of stone: ambiguity, bodies and identity as portrayed in Neolithic figurines,” in Archaeologies of the : critical perspectives. Susan Pollock and Reinhard Bernbeck (eds.). Malden MA: Blackwell, 152-183. Bailey, Douglas W.; 1994. “Reading prehistoric figurines as individuals,” World Archaeology 25(3): 321-331. Knapp, Bernard and Lynn Meskell; 1997. “Bodies of evidence on prehistoric Cyprus,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 7: 183-204.

Optional: Cauvin, Jacques; 2000. The birth of the gods and the origins of agriculture. Trans. Trevor Watkins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67-72 and 105-120.

Week 4: Sept. 29. Performance, performativity and ritual: towards an understanding of performed and embodied spaces, subjects, . Sites: Göbekli Tepe-Nevali Çori. Presentation topic: Neolithic in the Near East (an archaeological overview: current projects). Readings: Mitchell, Jon P.; 2006. “Performance” in Handbook of material culture. Christopher Tilley et. al. (eds.). London: Sage Publications, 384-401. Inomata, Takeshi and Lawrence S. Cohen; 2006. “Overture: an invitation to the archaeological theater,” in Archaeology of performance: theaters of power, community, and politics. Takeshi Inomata and Lawrenbce S. Cohen (eds.). Lanham: Altamira Press., 11-44. Carlson, Marvin; 2004. “The performance of culture: anthropological and ethnographic approaches” in Performance: a critical inttroduction. Second Edition. New York: Routledge, 11-30. Turnbull, David; 2002. “Performance and narrative, bodies and movement in the construction of places amd objects, spaces and knowledges,” Theory, Culture & Society 19 (5/6): 125-143. Thomas, Julian; 1993. “The hermeunetics of megalithic space,” in Interpretative archaeology. C. Tilley (ed.). Berg: Providence/Oxford, 73-98. Schmidt, Klaus; 2000. “Göbekli Tepe and the rock art of the Near East,” TÜBA-AR 3: 1-14. Hauptmann, Harald; 1999. “Urfa Region” in Neolithic in . Mehmet Özdogan and Nezih Basgelen (eds.). Istanbul: Arkeoloji ve Sanat Yayinlari, 65-86.

3 Week 5: Oct. 6. Çatalhöyük: social memory and everyday performance. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Connerton, Paul; 1989. “Bodily practices,” in How societies remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 72-104. Explore: http://www.catalhoyuk.com/ Hodder, Ian (ed.); 2000. Towards reflexive method in archaeology : the example at Çatalhöyük. Cambridge : McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. Hodder, Ian; 2006. “The spectacle of daily performance at Çatalhöyük,” in Archaeology of performance: theaters of power, community, and politics. Takeshi Inomata and Lawrenbce S. Cohen (eds.). Lanham: Altamira Press., 81-102. Hodder, Ian and C. Cessford; 2004. “Daily practice and social memory at Çatalhöyük,” American Antiquity 69: 17-40. Lewis-Williams, David; 2004. “Constructing a cosmos: architecture, power and domestication at Çatalhöyük,” Journal of Social Archaeology 4: 28-60. Last, Jonathan; 1998. “A design for life: interpreting the art of Çatalhöyük” Journal of material culture 3: 355- 378. Meskell, Lynn M. 2006. “Figurine worlds at Çatalhöyük: materiality, mobility and process,” Unpublished paper delivered at Ethnohistory workshop, University of Pennsylvania (April 6, 2006) (with author’s permission).

Week 6: Oct. 13. [Ömür out of town. This meeting will be rescheduled.] Materiality: artifacts and their performance in the social sphere. The case of the Uruk vase. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Miller, Daniel; 2005. “Materiality: an introduction” in Materiality. D. Miller (ed.). Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1-50. Alexander, Jeffry C.; 2006. “Cultural pragmatics: social performance between ritual and strategy,” in Social performance: symbolic action, cultural pragmatics, and ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 29-90. Gell, Alfred; 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1-27. Bahrani, Zainab; 2002. “Performativity and the image: narrative, representation and the Uruk vase,” in Leaving no stones unturned: essays on the Ancient Near East and Egypt in honor of Donald P. Hansen. E. Ehrenberg (ed.). Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2002: pages 15-22. (E-reserve) Cooper, Jerrold; 1993. “Sacred marriage and popular cult in early Mesopotamia,” in Official cult and popular religion in the Ancient Near East. Heidelberg: Universtatsverlag C. Winter, 81-96. Pollock, Susan and Reinhard Bernbeck; 2000. “And they said, let us make gods in our image: gendered ideologies in ancient Mesopotamia, ” in Reading the Body: Representations and remains in the archaeological record, Alison E. Rautman (ed.), University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 150-164. (E-reserve)

Week 7: Oct. 20. The body of the able ruler: Sexuality, representation and royal rhetoric in Gudea and Naram-Sin’s commemorative monuments. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Joyce, Rosemary; 2004. “Embodied subjectivity: gender, femininity, masculinity, sexuality,” in A companion to social archaeology. Lynn Meskell and Robert W. Preucel (eds.). Nalden MA: Blackwell, 82-95. Meskell, Lynn M.; 1998. “The irresistable body and the seduction of archaeology” in Changing bodies, changing meanings: studies on the human body in antiquity. D. Montserrat (ed.). London: Routledge, 139-161. Asher-Greve, Julia M.; 1998. “The essential body: Mesopotamian conceptions of the gendered body,” in Gender and the body in the ancient Mediterranean. Maria Wyke (ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell, 8-37. Winter, Irene J.; 1996. “Sex, rhetoric and the public monument: the alluring body of Naram-Sin of Agade” in Sexuality in Ancient Art, N.B.Kampen (ed.), Cambridge: 11-26. Gell, Alfred; 1998. “The distributed person” Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 96-154. Winter, Irene J.; 1989. “The body of the able ruler: Toward an understanding of the statues of Gudea” in DUMU-E2-DUB-BA-A, H. Behrens et al. (eds), Philadelphia: 573-583.

4 Winter, Irene J.; 1992. “Idols of the King: royal images as the recipients of ritual action in ancient Mesopotamia”, Journal of Ritual Studies 6: 13-42. Bahrani, Zainab; 2003. “Salmu: representation in the real,” in The graven image: representation in Babylonia and Assyria. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 121-148. Edzard, D. O.; 1997. Gudea and his dynasty. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

Week 8: Oct. 27. The polemical gendered body: Terracotta figurines of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia. Alternative readings: agency, materiality and corporeal magic. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Foucault, Michel; 1978. The history of sexuality. London, Routledge, 1-13. Bahrani, Zainab: 2001. Women of Babylon: gender and representation in Mesopotamia. London and New York: Routledge, 40-95. Assante, Julia; 2003. “From whores to hierodules: the historiographic invention of Mesopotamian female sex professionals,” in Ancient art and its historiography. Alice A. Donohue and Mark D. Fullerton (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13-47. Moorey, P.R.S.; 2003. Idols of the people : miniature images of clay in the ancient Near East. Oxford : Oxford University Press. Nakamura, Carolyn; 2005. “Mastering matters: magical sense and apotropaic figurine worlds of Neo- Assyria” in Archaeologies of materiality. Lynn Meskell (ed.). Malden MA: Blackwell, 18-45

Week 9: Nov. 3. Situated bodies: phenomenology of space, place and landscape. Rock- reliefs of the Hittite, Late Hittite and the Assyrian landscapes. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; 2003 (1945). “The spatiality of one’s own body and motility” in Phenomenology of perception. London and New York: Routledge, 113-170. Tilley, Christopher with Wayne Bennett; 2004. “From body to place to landscape: a phenomenological perspective,” in The materiality of stone: explorations in Landscape Phenomenology: 1. Oxford: Berg, 1-32. Casey, Edward; 2001. “Body, self and landscape: geophilosophical inquiry into the place-world,” in Textures of place: exploring humanist geographies. P.C. Adams et al. (eds.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 403-425. Shafer, Ann Taylor; 1998. The carving of an empire: Neo-Assyrian monuments on the periphery. Unpublished PhD Dissertation. Harvard University. Kreppner, Florian Janoscha; 2002. “Public space in nature: the case of Neo-Assyrian rock reliefs,” Altorientalische Forschungen 29: 367-383.

Week 10: Nov. 10. Gesture and royal rhetoric in Assyrian and Syro-Hittite architectural programs. Narrativity and performance in the urban space. Presentation topic: TBA. Readings: Lefebvre, Henri; 1991. “Spatial architectonics” in The production of space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 167-228. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Structures, habitus, practices” in The logic of practice. Richard Nice (trans.). Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 52-65. Mazzoni, Stefania; 1997. “The gate and the city: change and continuity in Syro-Hittite urban ideology,” in Die orientalische Stadt: Kontinuität, Wandel, Bruch. G. Wilhelm (ed.), SDV Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag: Saarbrücken: 307-338. Winter, Irene J.; 1981a. “Royal rhetoric and the development of historical narrative in Neo-Assyrian reliefs”, Studies in Visual Communication 7: 2-38. Reade, Julian; 2005. “Religious ritual in Assyrian sculpture,” in Ritual and politics in ancient Mesopotamia. B.N. Porter (ed.). New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society, 7-32 and plates pp. 33-62.

Week 11: Nov. 17. Ritual action, politics and state spectacles: The Assyro-Babylonian Akitu festival Presentation topic: TBA. 5 Readings: Debord, Guy; 1995 (1967), The society of spectacle. D. Nicholson-Smith (trans). New York: Zone Books, 11-24. , Catherine; 1997. Ritual: perspectives and dimensions. Oxford University Press, 1-22. Bidmead, Julye; 2002. The akitu festival: religious continuity and royal legitimation in Mesopotamia. New Jersey: Gorgias Press. Sommer, Benjamin D.; 2000. “The Babylonian akitu festival: Rectifying the king or renewing the cosmos?” The Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 27: 81-95. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate; 1997. “The interplay of military strategy and cultic practice in Assyrian politics,” in Assyria 1995. Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary Symposium of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Simo Parpola & R.M. Whiting (eds.). Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 245-252. Black, Jeremy A.; 1981. “The new year ceremonies in ancient Babylon: ‘taking Bel by the hand’ and a cultic picnic,” Religion 11: 39-59.

Nov 24- Thanksgiving-no class.

Week 12: Dec. 1. Student presentations of research projects and discussion (Paper drafts- due)

Week 13: Dec. 8. Final meeting: wrap up discussion: Archaeology, archaeological performance and the contemporary world. (Drafts returned with feedback) Readings: Shanks, Michael; 2004. “Three rooms: archaeology and performance,” Journal of social archaeology 4: 147-180.

Dec 18. – Final papers due. (5 pm- Ömür’s box or door)

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