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In the Neolithic megasite at Çatalhöyük families lived side by side in conjoined dwellings, like a pueblo. It can be assumed that people were always in and out of each others' houses – in this case via the roof. Social mechanisms were needed to make all this run smoothly, and in a tour-de-force of botanical, faunal and spatial analysis the authors show how it worked. Families stored their own produce of grain, fruit, nuts and condiments in special bins deep inside the house, but displayed the heads and horns of aurochs near the entrance. While the latter had a religious overtone they also remembered feasts, episodes of sharing that mitigated the provocations of a full larder.

Excavations and surveys carried out from the mid-1990s through 2009 at Tell Brak, northeast Syria, have focused on reconstructing the socioeconomic complexity and physical growth of one of northern Mesopotamia's earliest urban settlements. The recent discovery of several mass graves on the edge of the city, created at an important threshold in its physical expansion (ca. 3800-3600 B.C.), adds to a longstanding debate about the connection between the growth of early city-states and violent conflict. These graves, with their population of as many as several hundred primarily sub-adults and young adults, are interpreted as the result of large-scale violent events and may provide evidence for the post-mortem treatment of enemies. They offer a strong counterpoint to the dominant reconstruction of a peaceful prehistory in the region.

This review aims to show how the new results from Çatalhöyük in central Turkey contribute to wider theories about the Neolithic in Anatolia and the Middle East. I argue that many of the themes found in symbolism and daily practice at Çatalhöyük occur very early in the processes of village formation and the domestication of plants and animals throughout the region. These themes include a social focus on memory construction; a symbolic focus on wild animals, violence, and death; and a central dominant role for humans in relation to the animal world. These themes occur early enough throughout the region that we can claim they are integral to the development of settled life and the domestication of plants and animals. Particularly the focus on time depth in house sequences may have been part of the suite of conditions, along with environmental and ecological factors, that \"selected for\" sedentism and domestication.

Emotional news for lovers of a dry white wine. The blissful Hippocrene was composed from wild grapes from the sixth millennium BC in the lands of its natural habitat. But, as the author shows, the cultivation, domestication and selective breeding of the grape following in the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age was aimed primarily at the enjoyment of its sweetness.

Waerzeggers talks about the Babylonian Chronicles. In first millennium B.C. Babylonia, scribes compiled records of noteworthy events that happened in their own lifetimes and earlier in the past. The \"Babylonian Chronicles\" have aroused considerable interest among students of Babylonian history and ancient historiography alike. Even in their fragmentary state of preservation, these texts supply the master narrative for large tracts of Babylonian history, and their detached manner of reporting has struck modern readers as exceptional. The Chronicles are not, however, simply a database of facts objectively put together by anonymous list-makers of the past.

Scale and symmetry in monumental architecture are embraced by archaeologists as the primary vocabulary in past statements of power. In ancient Mesopotamia in particular, the excessive size of public buildings implied the control of both space and people. The predictable, often symmetrical plans regulated and reflected control over users’ behavior. However, interpretations based on plans alone remain simplistic; analyses from ground level can better encompass the lived experience of a building’s occupants or users. Close ground-level phenomenological analysis of movement through the Neo-Assyrian capital city of Khorsabad (constructed and inhabited 717–706 B.C.E.), particularly its citadel, indicates that manipulation of fields of view, interplay of light and shadow, and variations in sound were equally important means of conveying ideological messages.

Ancient cooking installations yield important evidence for cooking technology and human diet. A cooking installation termed the Philistine pebble hearth is associated with the arrival of the Philistines at the beginning of the Iron Age in the southern Levant (ca. early/mid-12th century b.c.). These installations have been studied using traditional methods, focusing on a description of form and style in relation to the pottery of the period. Here we present a study using an experimental approach. We prepared three sets of experimental pebble hearths to study the pebbles' thermal behavior in relation to their volume. The comparison of these results with observations of Iron Age I archaeological hearths reveals different patterns in pebble shattering and soot patterns, indicating that the archaeological hearths were used in a different manner than the experimental ones. The experiments highlight the utility of shattered pebbles as an indicator of the use of fire directly on Philistine hearths, even in the absence of ash and/or charcoal. They also demonstrate that these installations may have been used with open fire or live embers. The results are applicable to the study of hearths worldwide, with implications for appropriate excavation methods and basic identification of ancient pyrotechnologies.

Abstract The vast territorial extent of the Achaemenid Empire is often assumed to have impeded connectivity and communication within the empire. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption. Two factors in particular favor this conclusion—the presence of an extensive road network and the high communication speed in the empire, made possible by the pirradazish service. Together, they demonstrate the enormous potential for movement and interaction throughout the empire.

This work defines a clear set of monumental criteria for examining an inscription’s monumental appearance, including the appearance of the text (e.g., its arrangement on the monument, the use of decorations, variations in letter size, and, in the case of bilingual inscriptions, the presentation of two different languages) and its relationship to the monumental context (in its architectural setting and the urban context). The criteria are applied in a case study at Ephesos that is divided into two sections. The first section considers a series of three monuments at the Tetragonos Agora that date between ca. 3 B.C.E. and 130 C.E. The second applies the criteria to a broader range of material in a series of projects from two different contexts. The methodology demonstrates how an assessment of epigraphic monumentality can provide complementary information to that provided by the standard format of published inscriptions and how this information is applicable to a broader range of scholars.

Archaeological study of ancient agriculture in the eastern Mediterranean has traditionally focused on what crops were farmed, at what sites, during which periods. Questions about why farmers adopted specific agricultural strategies, however, have been left to historical analysis. Such an approach divorces the study of the actual residues of farming from the cultural and social environments that contextualize the decision-making processes of farmers. Rich new archaeobotanical and zooarchaeological data sets from the Mediterranean, however, offer an opportunity to reconstruct agricultural and land-use strategies and to study diachronic changes in those practices in relation to contemporary changes in political economy. This article uses the case study of the urban site of Gordion in central Anatolia to illustrate new techniques for reconstructing agricultural decision making from archaeological data and to contextualize diachronic changes in agriculture within their social and economic framework. I argue that several aspects of political economy—namely, taxation, long-distance trade, and settlement patterns—are primary factors in the adoption of specific agricultural strategies at Gordion and beyond. I conclude that states with direct control of agricultural production are more likely to adopt environmentally unsustainable land-use practices than those in which farmers have considerable autonomy. The methods and broader implications developed here have great relevance for the study of agriculture and rural economy at other sites in the Mediterranean and Near East and in other areas of the ancient world.