%0 Book Section %B The Provincial Archaeology of the Assyrian Empire %D 2016 %T The Rural Landscape of the Assyrian Heartland: Recent Results from Arbail and Kilizu Provinces %A Ur, Jason A. %A Osborne, James F. %E MacGinnis, John %E Wicke, Dirk %E Greenfield, Tina %X The world’s first empires were grand experiments in centralized political power and the territorial expansion of social control. The elite manifestations of empires are often prominent and have been studied intensively by historians and archaeologists, and they can lead to the impression that the state was all-pervasive in the lives of its citizens, from the rulers themselves down to the humblest farmer. Given the elite origins and biases of the historical and archaeological datasets, however, we might ask more precisely what were the impacts of empire on the quotidian lives of its people. Were issues of political control of concern only to competing elites, with little or no significance to the majority of the population, or were daily practices closely controlled? This paper addresses these issues by presenting preliminary data of the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) to better understand the settlement landscape in the heartland of the Neo-Assyrian empire (c. 934–605 bc) in northern Iraq. %B The Provincial Archaeology of the Assyrian Empire %I McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research %C Cambridge %P 163-174 %G eng