Archaeology Lecture Series Presents Jason Ur

The Department of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology presents "The Growth and Dissolution of Imperial Landscapes in Northern Mesopotamia" with Jason Ur (Harvard University).

The Plains of northern Mesopotamia have hosted a diverse range of settlement landscapes from the Neolithic to the present.  Early prehistoric settlements were self-sufficient villages and small towns, until larger towns and cities appeared in the Bronze Age, coincident with centralized political authority.  These new forms of political authority were not, however, used to plan or design the landscape.  This situation changed with the rise of Assyria, whose kings imposed their demographic, hydraulic, and ideological will upon the imperial heartland.  This designed landscape appears not to have survived the collapse of Assyrian royal authority, perhaps because it was it was imposed rather than emergent. This presentation will view this landscape evolution through the lens of the Erbil Plain, a major part of the Assyrian core that has been surveyed for ten seasons by an international team led by Harvard University and the Erbil Directorate of Antiquities in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.