At Umm el-Marra in western Syria, a sequence of Bronze Age ritual installations facilitates
the investigation of how Syrian elites employed memory, ancestor veneration, and animal …

The Umm el-Marra Project is investigating the genesis and early history of societal
complexity at a “second-tier” center of western Syria, focusing on the Early, Middle, and Late …

The emergence of political complexity in northern Mesopotamia ca. 2600 bc constituted an
important cultural revolution which transformed how people within nascent states …

This paper discusses the role played by metal procurement and distribution in the intense
relationships established between mobile, pastoral communities of the northern and north …

The demise of the traditional model of central, palace-based, bureaucratic Mesopotamian
societies as the template for interpreting all complex societies in the ancient Near East has …

Daily life in ancient Mesopotamia has often been depicted using a very broad brush, relying
on archaeological and textual evidence gathered from across at least three millennia (eg …

Through ritualization mankind satisfies some of its most profound needs. In 3rd millennium
BC Ebla, ritual strategies for survival took a cyclical pattern according to the alternation of the …

As Colin Renfrew has remarked, most archaeological discussions of burial that venture
beyond simple description tend to center on social relations–issues of prestige, social …

The accumulation of capital is a widely recognised, but little studied, feature of early
urbanisation in Mesopotamia during the fourth-millennium BC. Current research links the …

The history of social theory embodies in and of itself notions of recursive practice.
Functionalism, structuralism, post-structuralism were each acted on by people whose …