Creating Imperial Landscapes: Shifting Settlement Patterns and Agricultural Management Strategies in the Middle Assyrian Tal’afar (1400 – 1000 Bce)
BRUNT, Daisy
This paper explores the settlement patterns and economic landscapes of the mid to late 2nd millennium using unpublished data from the Tal’Afar Plain Survey to understand the changing agricultural management strategies which spanned the Mittanian (ca. 1600-1400 BCE) and Middle Assyrian periods (ca. 1400-1000 BCE). Aspects of this include the evaluation of settlement continuity, aggregate hinterland production value and land-use patterns. The application of geo-economical methods to mid to late 2nd millennium sites reveals a settlement system in which small sites are tightly integrated with larger dominant sites creating a centre sub-centre economic and presumably socio-political dependency following a strict settlement hierarchy. This is explored further in the investigation of the hypothetical procurement strategies found in the aggregate settlements spanning these two periods. The aggregate nature of settlements’ overlapping hinterlands in both periods is demonstrative of inter-settlement resource integration. And whilst there is a large decrease in sites from the Mittanian period to the Middle Assyrian period, correspondingly there is a much smaller reduction in hypothetical hinterland. This abandonment strategy could be representative of controlled land-use supporting the suggestion that the Middle Assyrian period was characterised by an economic strategy which intensified the settlement-hinterland ratio in the Northern Mesopotamian Plain. Against a backdrop of increasing political integration in the region following the subsumption of the loosely confederated polities of Hanigalbat into the Land of Aššur, this changing settlement system could reflect a local Middle Assyrian strategy which sought to organise its hinterland more effectively for local surplus exploitation.
Session 3. Urban and Landscape Studies: Finding Interpretative Approaches [info]