Tell Hamoukar is one of the largest Bronze Age sites in northern Mesopotamia. The present volume presents the results of three seasons of field survey and remote-sensing analysis at the site and its region. These studies were undertaken to address questions of urban origins, land use, and demographic trends through time. Site descriptions and settlement histories are presented for Hamoukar and fifty-nine other sites in its immediate hinterland over the last 8,000 years. The project paid close attention to the "off-site" landscape between sites and considered aspects of agricultural practices, land tenure, and patterns of movement. For each phase of occupation, the patterns of settlement and land use are contextualized within larger patterns of Mesopotamian history, with particular attention to the proto-urban fifth millennium B.C., the Uruk Expansion of the fourth millennium BC, the height of urbanism in the late third millennium, the impact of the Assyrian empire in the early first millennium BC, and the Abbasid landscape of the late first millennium AD.
The volume also includes a description of the unparalleled landscape of tracks in the Upper Khabur basin of Hassake province, northeastern Syria. Through analysis of CORONA satellite photographs, over 6,000 kilometers of premodern trackways were identified and mapped, mostly dating to the late third millennium and early Islamic periods. This area of northern Mesopotamia is thus one of the best-preserved ancient landscapes of movement in the world.
The volume's appendices describe the sixty sites, their surface assemblages, and the survey's ceramic typology.
CORONA satellite photography taken in the 1960s continues to reveal buried ancient landscapes and sequences of landscapes – some of them no longer visible. In this new survey of the Mughan Steppe in north-western Iran, the authors map a ‘signature landscape’ belonging to Sasanian irrigators, and discover that the traces of the nomadic peoples that succeeded them also show up on CORONA – in the form of scoops for animal shelters. The remains of these highly significant pastoralists have been virtually obliterated since the CORONA surveys by a new wave of irrigation farming. Such archaeological evaluation of a landscape has grave implications for the heritage of grassland nomads and the appreciation of their impact on history.
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TJ Wilkinson, McGuire Gibson, John Christiansen, Magnus Widell, David Schloen, Nicholas Kouchoukos, Christopher Woods, John C Sanders, Kathy-Lee Simunich, Mark Altaweel, Jason A Ur, Carrie Hritz, Jacob Lauinger, Tate Paulette, and Jonathan Tenney. 2007. “Modeling Settlement Systems in a Dynamic Environment: Case Studies from Mesopotamia.” In The Model-Based Archaeology of Socionatural Systems, edited by Timothy A Kohler and Sander van der Leeuw, Pp. 175-208. Santa Fe: School of American Research.Abstract
Once upon a time, three-dimensional (3-D) visualization of landscapes was the exclusive realm of highly trained computer experts. The production of an oblique view of a landscape took several detailed stages, each involving obscure datasets, arcane knowledge, and expensive software (and occasionally large amounts of money). This situation changed in 2005 with the release of Google Earth, a new visualization and mapping program by the ever-expanding Google suite of applications. The Google Earth program (free download fromhttp://earth.google.com) presents the user with an interactive globe...
Karim Alizadeh and Jason Ur. 2006. “Mughan Steppe Archaeological Survey.” Iranian Center for Archaeological Research Archaeological Reports, 4, Pp. 49-56 (In Farsi).Abstract
The first and second seasons of the Tell Brak Sustaining Area Survey took place in the autumn of 2002 and 2003, over seven weeks from mid September through the beginning of November.