Tracing Transitions and Connecting Communities in the Archaeology of Southwest Asia: Papers in Honour of Roger Matthews

Tracing Transitions and Connecting Communities in the Archaeology of Southwest Asia: Papers in Honour of Roger Matthews

Edited by Claudia Glatz, Mónica Palmero Fernández, Amy Richardson & Michael Seymour

This book features a collection of papers produced in honour of Roger Matthews, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at the University of Reading. Roger previously taught at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology (2001–2010), before which he served as the Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq (BSAI, today BISI) in Baghdad and the British Institute at Ankara (BIA) in the 1980s and 1990s.

The volume honours Roger’s legacy by assembling interdisciplinary research by his students, collaborators, and colleagues that maps challenges and new possibilities in the archaeology of Southwest Asia across the interrelated themes that have emerged from his work in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye.

 Paperback ISBN: 9789464263589 | Hardback ISBN: 9789464263596 | Imprint: Sidestone Press | Format: 210x280mm | 448 pp. | Language: English | 61 illus. (bw) | 131 illus. (fc) | Keywords: archaeology; Southwest Asia; Roger Matthews; Near Eastern archaeology; neolithic settlements; Mesopotamian civilization; Zagros region; archaeological theory; material culture; human-environment interactions | download cover | DOI: 10.59641/9j812mv | CC-license: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Foreword
Author Biographies
Selected Publications by Roger Matthews

1. Devolving Early Neolithic community ecology: animal connections and interactions at Bestansur, Iraq Robin Bendrey

2. “If only those jaws could move”. A narrative of Building 1 at Çatalhöyük
Ian Hodder

3. Beyond subsistence: new perspectives on Sialk North village, 6000-4900 BCE
Hassan Fazeli Nashli, Javad Hussainzadeh and Jebraeil Nokandeh

4. Cities, symbols and deities: ancient and modern constructions of political power in Late Chalcolithic southern Iraq
Mónica Palmero Fernández

5. Washing hands and feet? Personal hygiene at Abu Salabikh (and further north)
Nicholas Postgate

6. To change, or not to change… Transitional glyptic styles in ED II Fara / Šuruppak and their relation to officialdom
Adelheid Otto

7. Two Babylonian beakers and an unpublished report on excavations at Ur in 1858
John Curtis

8. How high were the walls of Mesopotamia?
John MacGinnis

9. Large-scale pottery production at Middle Bronze Age Qatna
Daniele Morandi Bonacossi

10. The beads from the Achaemenid period of the archaeological site of Barikot, Swat Valley, northern Pakistan (c. 500-350 BCE): a preliminary typological study
Mubariz Ahmed Rabbani

Interlude 1: Roger’s deconstruction seminar
Birger Ekornåsvåg Helgestad

11. Human-environmental interactions in the Zagros region from the Epipalaeolithic to the Neolithic period: key debates and issues
Maria Rabbani

12. Still mind the gap: a note on the ‘missing millennium’ between the Late Epipaleolithic and the Transitional Neolithic in the Central Zagros
Hojjat Darabi

13. The walking dead: a brief view on the mobility of mortuary remains and practices in the Neolithic central Zagros and adjacent regions
Judith Thomalsky

14. Rural fortitude at Çadır Höyük: the 5.9 and 5.2 kya climate events on the Anatolian plateau
Madelynn von Baeyer, Sharon R. Steadman and Benjamin Arbuckle

15. Commensality, ritual and the making of transtopographic communities
Claudia Glatz

16. Ancient neighbourhoods
Alessandra Salvin

17. “Alas the destroyed city!” A search for private houses of the Ur III period at Ur
Elizabeth Stone and Paul Zimansky

18. Thinking through and beyond the hinterland: towards a critical archaeology of rural settlements in Western Asia
Christoph Bachhuber

19. Hilltop forts and pasture control: the spatial organisation of the semi-nomadic communities in the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age South Caucasus
Guido Guarducci

20. Archaeology of the recent past in mountainous Kurdistan: Kani Gund village
Karel Nováček, Lenka Starková and Hemin Naman Kawes

Interlude 2. A person of influence: in gratitude and admiration to Prof. Roger Matthews
Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin

21. East India Company diplomats and antiquarians in early nineteenth-century Iraq
Michael Seymour

22. Partialities, priorities and unintended glimpses of the archaeological process: a review of the site reports of the British excavations at Carchemish
Lisa Cooper

23. Reverting to the Fertile Crescent: the story of the CZAP project 2008
Yaghoub Mohammadifar with Leila Ghanbari

24. Leading transitions in research excavations: impacts of the excavations at Neolithic Bestansur
Amy Richardson and Kamal Raeuf Aziz

25. Decolonising knowledge-making on Iraq: a conversation with Zahra Ali
Alesia Koush