Cultic resilience and inter-city engagement at the dawn of urban history: protohistoric Mesopotamia and the ‘city seals’, 3200-2750 BC

Within the context of early urbanism, elite groups developed the world’s earliest writing in Mesopotamia, 3200-2750 BC, comprising administrative documents in the form of inscribed clay tablets. How did these proto-literate urban communities engage with each other and what strategies did they employ to address major challenges to their survival? The ‘city seal’ evidence survives as seal impressions on clay bureaucratic artefacts, both inscribed tablets and impressed sealings. These impressions feature signs representing the names of Mesopotamian cities, many of them identifiable with known sites. The documents stand at the threshold of history, as the earliest evidence for inter-city engagement. Using an innovative methodology and interpretive framework of cultic resilience, we integrate archaeometric, iconographic, and functional analyses of the earliest stages of writing and sealing, to argue that the city seal evidence provides unique insights into inter-city cooperation by Mesopotamian cities during a critical episode of early urban development

Landscapes of Urbanization and De-Urbanization: A Large-Scale Approach to Investigating the Indus Civilization's Settlement Distributions in Northwest India.

Survey data play a fundamental role in studies of social complexity. Integrating the results from multiple projects into large-scale analyses encourages the reconsideration of existing interpretations. This approach is essential to understanding changes in the Indus Civilization's settlement distributions (ca. 2600-1600 b.c.), which shift from numerous small-scale settlements and a small number of larger urban centers to a de-nucleated pattern of settlement. This paper examines the interpretation that northwest India's settlement density increased as Indus cities declined by developing an integrated site location database and using this pilot database to conduct large-scale geographical information systems (GIS) analyses. It finds that settlement density in northwestern India may have increased in particular areas after ca. 1900 b.c., and that the resulting landscape of de-urbanization may have emerged at the expense of other processes. Investigating the Indus Civilization's landscapes has the potential to reveal broader dynamics of social complexity across extensive and varied environments.ER

Urban and Transport Scaling: Northern Mesopotamia in the Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age

Scaling methods have been applied to study modern urban areas and how they create accelerated, feedback growth in some systems while efficient use in others. For ancient cities, results have shown that cities act as social reactors that lead to positive feedback growth in socioeconomic measures. In this paper, we assess the relationship between settlement area expressed through mound area from Late Chalcolithic and Bronze Age sites and mean hollow way widths, which are remains of roadways, from the Khabur Triangle in northern Mesopotamia. The intent is to demonstrate the type of scaling and relationship present between sites and hollow ways, where both feature types are relatively well preserved. For modern roadway systems, efficiency in growth relative to population growth suggests roads should show sublinear scaling in relation to site size. In fact, similar to modern systems, such sublinear scaling results are demonstrated for the Khabur Triangle using available data, suggesting ancient efficiency in intensive transport growth relative to population levels. Comparable results are also achieved in other ancient Near East regions. Furthermore, results suggest that there could be a general pattern relevant for some small sites (0–2 ha) and those that have fewer hollow ways, where β, a measure of scaling, is on average low (≈ < 0.2). On the other hand, a second type of result for sites with many hollow ways (11 or more) and that are often larger suggests that β is greater (0.23–0.72), but still sublinear. This result could reflect the scale in which larger settlements acted as greater social attractors or had more intensive economic activity relative to smaller sites. The provided models also allow estimations of past roadway widths in regions where hollow ways are missing