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Durham Research Online Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 27 January 2015 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Lawrence, D. and Wilkinson, T. J. (2015) 'Hubs and upstarts : pathways to urbanism in the northern Fertile Crescent.', Antiquity., 89 (344). pp. 328-344. Further information on publisher's website: http://dx.doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2014.44 Publisher's copyright statement: Copyright c Antiquity Publications Ltd., 2015. This paper has been published in a revised form, subsequent to editorial input by Cambridge University Press, in 'Antiquity' (89: 344 (2015) 328-344) http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=AQY Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Hubs and upstarts: pathways to urbanism in the northern Fertile Crescent Dan Lawrence* & T.J. Wilkinson To appear in Antiquity, April 2015 1Department of Archaeology, Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK (Email: [email protected]) The origins of urbanism are a controversial subject, with neo-evolutionary progress through graduated stages of ‘civilisation’ still having significant influence despite criticism, while others in the field prefer more diverse, regionally based trajectories. Using data collected over 30 years and applying the full range of archaeological and historical sources, the authors offer an alternative reading of the evidence, identifying multiple pathways to urbanism within a single region—northern Mesopotamia. Here, early urbanism was a phased and pulsating phenomenon that could be sustained only within particular geographic parameters and for limited periods. Older urban hubs, growing slowly, were accompanied by rapidly expanding new sites, with the combination of the different forms demonstrating the complexities of urban growth. Keywords: Late Chalcolithic, Early Bronze Age (EBA), Fertile Crescent, urbanism, tell, survey, database, regional exchange Introduction The development of large-scale urban centres has long been a research focus for archaeologists, especially in areas of the world where complex societies are considered to have arisen ex nihilis to form ‘pristine’ civilisations. A key debate in this research has centred on the efficacy of neo-evolutionary approaches to social change and their relationship with more historically contingent models. Neo-evolutionary theory argues that societies pass through defined stages of increasing complexity (bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states, although there may be significant sub-divisions and variations in terminology within each of these categories) in a process that is both unilinear and non-reversible. The central tenets of the theory are considered universal, allowing for the comparison and categorisation of all societies across both time and space, and resulting in the investigation of cross-cultural regularities at a global scale (Flannery 1999). This approach has come under sustained attack from scholars who highlight the variation in the types of complex society visible in the 1 archaeological record and who reject the idea of a single trajectory of increasing complexity as both mechanistic and teleological (McIntosh 1999; Yoffee 2005; Blanton & Fargher 2008). Rather than looking for cross-cultural ‘laws’ that are generally applicable, emphasis is instead placed on the unique nature of social and political developments in a given region over a particular period and, consequently, the variety of possible routes to different forms of ‘complexity’. However, there is still a tendency among scholars to generalise at the regional level, so that we may talk of ‘African states’, ‘Mesoamerican chiefdoms’ or ‘Mesopotamian cities’ as sets of unified and uniform entities. More importantly, even within this literature, few explicit alternatives to neo-evolutionary models have been proposed. This paper demonstrates the existence of multiple pathways to urbanised societies within northern Mesopotamia during the late fifth, fourth and third millennia BC, and it provides models through which these trajectories may be understood. We make use of excavation data, historical information derived from texts and archaeological surveys to examine the relationship between urban centres and their hinterlands through time. This approach draws on a growing body of theory that emphasises the relatively simple relationships that may exist for cities at a variety of different scales, focusing on population density, occupied areas and technological constraints (Fletcher 1995, 2004; Batty 2013; Bettencourt 2013). Evidence is drawn from surveys conducted over the past 30 years in the vicinity of a range of centres across the northern Fertile Crescent (Figure 1 & Table 1). The approach is explicitly regional in scope and incorporates evidence from an area only slightly smaller than the United Kingdom, some 130 000km2, including a range of terrains, precipitation regimes and environmental circumstances. <FIGURE 1> <TABLE 1> Emerging complexity in the Late Chalcolithic We can distinguish two phases of urbanisation in northern Mesopotamia during the period in question: firstly, during the Late Chalcolithic period (4400–3000 BC); and secondly, during the latter part of the Early Bronze Age (EBA; 2600–2000 BC), punctuated by a period of ruralisation (Ur 2010b). Our understanding of the dynamics of settlement change in the Late Chalcolithic is hampered by the relatively unrefined chronological schema available. The most widely used ceramic chronology subdivides the 1400-year period of the Late Chalcolithic into five phases, labelled LC 1–5 (Rothman 2001; Schwartz 2001). The majority of surveys conducted before the publication of the LC chronology did not subdivide the Late 2 Chalcolithic beyond noting the presence of southern Mesopotamian Uruk types, which we now know to be restricted to the LC 4 and 5 phases. Given this chronological uncertainty, it is difficult to make nuanced statements about the nature of Late Chalcolithic urbanism. However, within this phase small-scale centres of between 10 and 20 hectares emerged, along with evidence for craft specialisation, monumental architecture and long-distance trade. Occasional sites of this size had existed before, notably at Domuztepe during the Halaf period (Carter et al. 2003) and Tell Zeidan and Tell al-Hawa during the Ubaid (Ball et al. 1989; Stein 2012), but by the Late Chalcolithic at least 10 sites across the region had reached 10ha. These sites are generally high tells or citadel mounds with steep sides, suggesting that they developed gradually through successive building phases. Three sites in the central and eastern Khabur Basin, however, reached much larger sizes, including Tell al-Hawa at 50ha (Ball et al. 1989), Tell Brak, initially 55ha during LC 1–2, growing to 130ha during the LC 3 and Uruk periods (Ur et al. 2011), and Khirbet al Fakhar at Tell Hamoukar, which might have been over 300ha and was at least 30ha during the early part of the period (Ur 2010a; Al- Quntar et al. 2011). All three of these sites included an occupational mound as well as wider scatters of dispersed settlement in the surrounding area. Late Chalcolithic settlement is spatially discontinuous: sites are concentrated in a series of well-watered lowlands and basins along major rivers, with large swathes of intervening steppe and upland being more sparsely inhabited (Figure 2). With the exception of the Khabur Triangle, each basin contains a single ‘centre’. Evidence from multiple archaeological surveys suggests an absence of settlement hierarchies of more than two tiers, with centres surrounded by a number of smaller sites of similar size and a gradual increase in settlement density over time. There is also a strong positive correlation between the size of the largest site within a survey and the density of occupation in the surrounding landscape (Figure 3). These data are computed by dividing the published site counts from each survey by the area of the survey, which is in turn adjusted to compensate for the differences in the length of the Late Chalcolithic phases used (Wilkinson et al. 2014). This model helps to mitigate the ‘problem of contemporaneity’, where longer phases result in the amalgamation of successive settlement patterns (Ammerman 1981; Schact 1984). If we take settlement density as a proxy for population density, this pattern has significant consequences for understanding early urban development. Most clearly, it suggests a relationship between population size and urban growth that holds for both the relatively small centres and the three larger centres in the Jazira. The three largest sites, Tell Brak, Khirbet al Fakhar and Tell al- Hawa, may therefore result from the same sorts of processes as the smaller centres. 3 <FIGURE 2> <FIGURE 3> High population density reduces the ‘costs’ of social interaction, as the physical distance between
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