Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams


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Series: Ideas, Debates, and Perspectives 3
ISBN: 978-1-931745-32-1
Publication Date: Jan 2007
Price: OUT OF PRINT, eBook $65
  • Open Access: PDF

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Elizabeth C. Stone

This volume of essays dedicated to Robert McCormick Adams reflects both the breadth of his research and the select themes upon which he focused his attention. These essays written by his students and disciplesSettlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to R. Mc. Adams focus on issues in Near Eastern archaeology but range as far afield as the Indus Valley and Mesoamerica. They are also concentrate on aspects of early complex society, but some refer back to the late Neolithic and others forward to Islamic times. The key foci of Adams’ work are reflected in this collection: ecology, frontiers, urbanism, trade and technology are all explored. Yet in spite of the breadth of the scope of this volume, the various intellectual threads pioneered by Adams serve to Settlement and Society: Essays Dedicated to R. Mc. Adamstie the volume together. These include the use of multiple lines of evidence to attack problems, the use of a comparative approach – including the use of ethnographic analogy–as a means of understanding the development of early states, the importance of the continuum of settlement between city dwellers, farmers, marsh dwellers and pastoralists, and an overall appreciation of cultural ecology.
Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Landscape Archaeology in Mesopotamia: Past, Present, and Future by Nicholas Kouchoukos and Tony Wilkinson

Chapter 2. Archaeological Surveys and Mesopotamian History by Hans J. Nissen

Chapter 3. KLM to CORONA: A Bird’s-Eye View of Cultural Ecology and Early Mesopotamian Urbanization by Jennifer R. Pournelle
Chapter 4. Cycles of Settlement in the Khorramabad Valley in Luristan, Iran by Frank Hole
Chapter 5. Harappan Geoarchaeology Reconsidered: Holocene Landscapes and Environments of the Greater Indus Plain by Joseph Schuldenrein, Rita Wright, and Mohammed Afzal Khan
Chapter 6. Representing Abundance: The Visual Dimension of the Agrarian State by Irene J. Winter
Chapter 7. Resisting Empire: Elam in the First Millennium BC by Elizabeth Carter
Chapter 8. The Lattimore Model and Hatti’s Kaska Frontier by Paul Zimansky
Chapter 9. Ancient Agency: Using Models of Intentionality to Understand the Dawn of Despotism by Henry T. Wright
Chapter 10. City and Countryside in Third-Millennium Southern Babylonia by Piotr Steinkeller
Chapter 11. The Mesopotamian Urban Experience by Elizabeth C. Stone
Chapter 12. The Archaeology of Early Administrative Systems in Mesopotamia by Mitchell S. Rothman
Chapter 13. Islamic Archaeology and the “Land behind Baghdad” by Donald Whitcomb
Chapter 14. The Urban Organization of Teotihuacan, Mexico by George L. Cowgill
Chapter 15. The Harappan Settlement of Gujarat by Gregory L. Possehl
Chapter 16. A Tale of Two Oikumenai: Variation in the Expansionary Dynamics of ˤUbaid and Uruk Mesopotamia by Gil J. Stein and Rana Özbal
Chapter 17. The Sumerian Takeoff by Guillermo Algaze
Chapter 18. Transformative Impulses in Late Bronze Age Technology: A Case Study from the Amuq Valley, Southern Turkey by K. Aslıhan Yener