All are welcome to the next Harvard Anthropology spring seminar featuring speaker Petra Creamer from Emory University!
3:00-4:30pm | Thursday, February 27th – Tozzer Anthropology Building Rm. 203
Organizing the Empire at Home: Intensification, Administration, and Extraction in the Assyrian Heartland
As the largest polity the world had yet seen, stretching from Egypt to Iran at its height, the Assyrian Empire (c. 1350-612 BCE) provides a remarkable case study for assessing the effects of imperial power structures on those under their hegemony. Assyrian mega-urban centers such as Nimrud, Khorsabad, and Nineveh sustained growing populations which far outstripped those of prior polities, creating urgent challenges to maintaining not only the empire abroad, but at home. Apparent responses to these challenges include programs of mass population resettlement, agricultural intensification, and increasingly centralized administration over the landscape and its resources, though the exact mechanisms for these are still poorly understood. The ongoing archaeological project Rural Landscapes of Iron Age Imperial Mesopotamia (RLIIM) in Iraqi Kurdistan investigates the nature of nonurban sites founded during the height of the Assyrian Empire and their persistence through imperial collapse in 612 BCE. Excavations and remote sensing at the site of Qach Rresh on the Erbil Plain have pointed to the site’s importance as a rural center for storage and production. In this talk, I discuss our current results from Qach Rresh and how they fit within broader structures of Assyrian resource management and city provisioning.