Urban Domestic Economy and Social Organization at Early Bronze Age Titris Hoyuk, Turkey

在美国国家科学基金会的支持下，蒂莫西·马特尼博士和他的同事们将在土耳其东南部青铜时代早期城市提特里斯·霍尤克的一个家庭居住区域进行考古实地调查。对恢复的人工、生态和经济数据的分析将持续到2001年。在青铜时代早期（公元前2600-2100年），许多城市政体出现在近东的“新月沃土”地区。这种出现形成了城市生活和社会关系的运动模式，最终形成了西方文明城市传统的基础。然而，对这一过程如何发展的理解远未完成。在很大程度上，早期近东城市的考古工作主要集中在这些中心的核心地带的寺庙和宫殿区域，而忽略了周边更广泛的家庭居住区域。因此，科学家仍然缺乏关于家庭经济和社会组织性质的大量数据，而了解这些单位对于重建这些城市的功能至关重要。马特尼博士和他的同事们将挖掘一个保存完好的家庭住宅，以测试古代美索不达米亚家庭经济和社会组织的当前模式。之前在Titris Hoyuk进行的地下磁测绘提供了一幅相当高分辨率的城市主要建筑特征地图。这使得一个保存完好的建筑遗迹区域得以存在，根据它们的大小、朝向和形态，几乎可以肯定是家庭住宅。该团队将专注于对单个独立的大型住宅建筑中大约15个房间的内容进行详细检查。将分析与房间地板相关的古植物、古动物、植物岩、微碎屑和残余有机物质及其特征。有了这些数据，就有可能研究家庭一级的资源生产和消费模式。马特尼博士将检验一个基本上未被证明的假设，即美索不达米亚城市的家庭生活是围绕在由寺庙和宫殿组织的巨大再分配系统主导的经济环境中运作的大家庭来组织的。通过集中精力在一个主要地点的非精英居住区，该项目将阐明家庭组织、生产和消费实践的本质。它将纠正目前对美索不达米亚古代经济制度的有偏见的理解，这种理解主要是从楔形文字文本和村庄民族志中重建的。这项工作将为考古学家提供美索不达米亚古代城市发展的更全面的图景，允许与来自其他地区和时期的城市起源的理论模型进行比较。

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Timothy Matney and his colleagues will conduct archaeological fieldwork in a domestic habitation area within the Early Bronze Age city of Titris Hoyuk in southeastern Turkey. Analysis of the recovered artifactual, ecofactual and economic data will continue through 2001. The Early Bronze Age (ca. 2600-2100 BC) saw the emergence of numerous urban polities across much of the near Eastern "Fertile Crescent." This emergence set into motion patterns of city life and social relations that ultimately form much of the basis for the urban tradition of western civilization. Yet understanding of how this process developed is far from complete. To a great degree archaeological work on early Near Eastern cities has focused on temple and palace areas at the very core of those centers and has ignored the much more extensive areas of domestic habitation at their periphery. As a result, scientists still lack substantial data for the nature of household economies and social organization, and understanding of these units is essential for reconstructing how these cities functioned. Dr. Matney and colleagues will excavate a single well-preserved domestic residence to test current models of household economy and social organization in ancient Mesopotamia. Previous subsurface magnetic mapping at Titris Hoyuk has provided a fairly high resolution map of primary architectural features within the city. This has allowed the location of an area of well-preserved architectural remains which, based on their size, orientation and morphology are almost certainly domestic residences. The team will focus on a detailed examination of the contents of approximately fifteen rooms in a single discrete large residential building. Recovered paleobotanical, paleofaunal, phytolith, microdebris and residual organic materials associated with room floor and features will be analyzed. With these data it will then be possible to study patterns of resource production and consumption at a household level. Dr. Matney will test the largely undemonstrated assumption that domestic life throughout Mesopotamian cities was organized around extended households operating within a economic climate dominated by great redistributive systems run through temple and palace organizations. By concentrating efforts on non-elite residential areas of a major site, this project will illuminate the nature of household organization, production and consumption practices. It will correct the biased current understanding of ancient economic systems in Mesopotamia which is reconstructed largely from cuneiform texts and village ethnographies. The work will provide archaeologists with a more holistic picture of ancient urbanism in Mesopotamia, allowing for comparisons with theoretical models of urban genesis derived from other regions and time periods.