Stamp seal of a lion attacking a horned animal, ca 3500 BC,Tell Hamoukar; photo courtesy of Salam Al Kuntar and Clemens Reichel.
The Mesopotamian Economic Boom and Emergence of the First Cities in the Late Chalcolithic Period (4200-3100 BC)
Salam Al Kuntar (Visiting Research Scholar, ISAW)
NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time
The Late Chalcolithic period in Mesopotamia (4200-3100 BC), widely known as the Uruk period, witnessed the first complex urban societies of the ancient Near East. Excavation and survey data indicate that the period is marked by unprecedented settlement growth and the development of settlement hierarchy, emergence of large public buildings, large scale manufacturing of utilitarian and prestige goods, and evidence for organized labor and administrative systems. This talk will discuss the economic variables underlying the process of urban growth and socio-economic differentiation. Al Kuntar’s argument is based on recently examined data from the sites of Hamoukar, Tell Brak, and Tepe Gawra in Upper Mesopotamia. The archeological evidence from these sites demonstrates that the expansion of specialized production systems and interregional exchange networks were major components of an autonomous process of economic growth. The outcome of this process was the emergence of urban centers and political institutions that sponsored and administered production and inter-regional exchange as a strategy for creating and controlling wealth, and ultimately for acquiring and maintaining power and authority.
--Reception to follow
Salam Al Kuntar is a Syrian archaeologist. She received her BA from Damascus University (1996), her MA from the University of Liverpool (2004), and her PhD in Archaeology from the University of Cambridge (2009). She has worked with the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums in Syria in a number of capacities from 1996-2012. Al Kuntar has excavated at numerous sites in Syria and is the Co-Director of the Tell Hamoukar Expedition from 2005 to the present. Her research interests center upon the archaeology and heritage of the Near East exploring a wide variety of themes such as ancient economy and urbanism, human mobility and cultural boundaries, forced migration, and cultural heritage and identity in the Middle East. Al Kuntar was a visiting assistant professor/assistant curator at the University of Pennsylvania from 2012 to 2014. She is currently a consulting scholar at the Penn Museum. She co-directs the Safeguarding the Heritage of Syria and Iraq Initiative—a project run by the Penn Cultural Heritage Center, the Smithsonian Institute, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. During her time at ISAW, she will explore the social and economic interactions that shaped the overall organization of the interregional networks in the Late Chalcolithic Period in Northern Mesopotamia. These cross-cultural networks created significant convergence in technology and style over a large geographical area. Efforts of the LC communities to find the most efficient production strategies in this period of economic growth led to analogous similarity in material culture. Her argument is based on data previously collected from the sites of Hamoukar and Brak, and also from her examination of the Tepe Gawra collection at the Penn Museum.