8. Marchetti, N., Domenici, D., 2018. Urbanized Landscapes in Early

Urbanized Landscapes in Early Syro-Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mesoamerica © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 Urbanized Landscapes in Early Syro-Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mesoamerica Papers of a Cross-Cultural Seminar held in Honor of Robert McCormick Adams Edited by Davide Domenici and Nicolò Marchetti 2018 Harrassowitz Verlag · Wiesbaden © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 Cover image: UAV’s view taken in October 2016 of Tell Ruba‘yat Al Torra, site Qd028/ Adams 1135 in the Delmej reservoir (Al Qadisiyah, Iraq), by courtesy of the QADIS project/Giampaolo Luglio. Th is publication has been produced with the assistance of the European Union. Th e contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and implementing partners of the EDUU project (www.eduu.unibo.it) and can in no way be taken to refl ect the views of the European Union. Bibliografi sche Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografi e; detaillierte bibliografi sche Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Th e Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografi e; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de Text and images are under the License Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 of the Authors and Harrassowitz Verlag, if not credited otherwise. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. For further information about our publishing program consult our website http://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de © Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden 2018 Printed on permanent/durable paper. Printing and binding: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-447-11086-0 e-ISBN 978-3-447-19782-3 DOI: 10.12878/2018HARRASSOWITZVERLAG © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 Table of contents Institutional Affiliations of the Authors…………………………………………………… 7 Preface……………………………………………………………………………………… 9 Gary M. Feinman 1. The Comparative Investigation of Early Urbanized Landscapes: An Interdisciplinary Reframing………………………………………………………… 13 Davide Domenici 2. Beyond Dichotomies: Teotihuacan and the Mesoamerican Urban Tradition………… 35 Pascal Butterlin 3. Princes marchands d’Uruk? L’expansion urukéenne en question (Études proto-urbaines 5)……………………………………………………………… 71 Giacomo Benati 4. The Construction of Large-scale Networks in Late Chalcolithic Mesopotamia: Emergent Political Institutions and Their Strategies…………………………………… 103 Nicolò Marchetti 5. Wandering through Early Urbanized Landscapes in Syro-Mesopotamia…………….. 145 Simone Mantellini 6. Landscape Archaeology and Irrigation Systems in Central Asia: A View from Samarkand (Uzbekistan)………………………………………………… 169 Norman Yoffee 7. The Evolution of Urban Society Today: Robert Adams in and for the New Century…………………………………………… 205 Appendix. Publications of Robert McCormick Adams (1926-2018)……………………… 217 © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 Institutional Affiliations of the Authors Giacomo Benati Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna [email protected] Pascal Butterlin Universitè de Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne [email protected] Davide Domenici Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna [email protected] Gary M. Feinman Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago [email protected] Simone Mantellini Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna [email protected] Nicolò Marchetti Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna [email protected] Norman Yoffee University of Michigan Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University [email protected] © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 Preface In the last ten years or so, the two of us have often been meeting in the corridors or in the clois- ter of the 16th century building of piazza San Giovanni in Monte, the seat of our Department of History and Cultures at the University of Bologna. When meeting, we usually talked about the results of our latest fieldwork season, Davide in Mexico or in the US, Nicolò in Turkey or Iraq. Apart from building a close friendship, those informal talks showed that our works, despite being carried out in so distant regions, often had something in common, or at least posed common problems in terms of methodology, research questions, and anthropological models. Such shared interests made that toward the end of 2013, we started thinking about co-organizing a conference where some specialists from the two areas could convene and discuss: the timing was almost perfect, since two years later it would have been the 50th anniversary of the publication of Bob Adams’ seminal book The Evolution of Urban Society: Early Mesopotamia and Prehispanic Mexico (1966), a milestone in the history of comparative archaeology, precisely centered on our areas of expertise. Things went fast ahead and on February 9-10, 2015 the Seminar “Adams@50. Urbanized landscapes in early Syro-Mesopotamia and pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica” was held in Bologna, where a selected group of outstanding colleagues joined us from various countries of the world. This book, containing the papers presented in Bologna, was originally meant to be published as a celebration of Bob Adams’ pioneering work. Unfortunately, the preparation of the book was slower than expected, while life went forward faster: just a few days before sending the complete draft to the publisher, we received the news that Bob Adams had passed away. It is with great sadness that we had to acknowledge that our book would have become a commemoration of a giant rather than a celebration of a joyful anniversary. Nevertheless, we decided not to change the content of the book to include more celebratory texts, because the best way to remember a scholar of the kind of Adams is probably to go on doing research that is shaped or inspired by his work, posing new questions around the same problems that he tackled in his academic life. Nobody of us attempted the awesome task to perform comparisons between Mesoamerican and Mesopotamian archaeological cases. Rather, the authors of the papers tackled the topics of “urbanism” and “landscape” – key terms in Bob Adams’ work – according to different perspectives that could raise interesting points for a cross- cultural dialogue, and a thought-provoking cross-fertilization. 1 1 The chapters of the book are in most cases reworked versions of the papers presented in Bologna. Unfortunately, Nikolai Grube and David Wengrow, who participated in the Bologna Seminar with papers dealing respectively with Classic Maya urbanism and Eurasian “megasites”, were not able to prepare a text for this volume; on the other hand, we are glad to have been able to include a chapter by Pascal Butterlin, who was not present at the original Bologna Seminar but who attended one of its outcomes, which we termed 2nd Bologna Seminar on Cross-Cultural Archaeology, devoted to the topic of “Empires in the Archaeological Record” and held on February 8th, 2016. We are grateful to the Department of History © 2018, Otto Harrassowitz GmbH & Co. KG, Wiesbaden ISBN Print: 9783447110860 — ISBN E-Book: 9783447197823 A possible theoretical framework for such cross-cultural analyses is presented in the first chapter, where Gary Feinman advocates a middle-range comparative approach that can avoid both universalizing explanations of perceived commonalities and minute descriptions only aimed at charting cultural variability. The approach he proposes, based on theories concerning coopera- tion, collective action, and social networks, is obviously not the only possibility (and the fact that it opens the book doesn’t mean that all the authors would agree with Feinman’s proposal), but it is nevertheless an excellent example of an enduringly fruitful venue for cross-cultural comparison, searching explanations for parallel – not universal – cultural processes. Davide Domenici, in his paper on Teotihuacan urban structure, contends that a new inter- pretation of the Central Mexican metropolis’ corpus of mural paintings – where he sees a proper writing system at work – could reveal a not-so-centralized urban landscape, segmented in various palace-centered sociopolitical units that could have enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy rather than being subject to an all-encompassing central government. The comparison with other Mesoamerican political systems, and especially with those of the Late Postclassic Nahua, leads the author to reconsider the dichotomy often posited between Lowland Maya and Central Mexican political systems, stressing the importance in both areas of semi-autonomous subsystems or sociopolitical segments, whose relevance, for instance, has also been stressed by Mesopotamian scholars such as Bob Adams or Norman Yoffee. The outreach

Load more