The Role of Highland-Lowland Interactions in the Development of Social Complexity

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Prof. Jesse Casana (Dartmouth College), Dr. Claudia Glatz (University of Glasgow), and an international team of researchers will investigate the crucial role that inter-regional interaction among highland and lowland communities had in driving the emergence and development of early imperial states. Focusing on an archaeologically unexplored borderland region between the Mesopotamian plains of southern Iraq and the Zagros Mountains of western Iran, this project will document a wealth of information regarding the communities who inhabited the area during a historical period that saw the rise of the world's first empires. Results will transform understanding of highland-lowland interaction in greater Mesopotamia, and will thereby offer a new model for considering similar processes globally. In many states in the world today altitudinal variation plays a significant role in partitioning populations and structuring relations among them. This research places such interactions into a long term chronological context. Furthermore, this effort will provide invaluable cultural heritage management data in the region, documenting new archaeological sites, evidence of looting or damage, and an assessment of future threats from expanding agriculture and construction. As the only international archaeological project to have ever worked within this part of Iraq, the project will also play an important role in developing capacities of the local antiquities authorities through training, technology transfer, and public workshops.This project speaks to and challenges a long history of scholarship which views the origin of Old World complex societies, from the Nile to the Yangtze, as a process nested squarely in the urban centers of lowland river valleys. Mountainous regions, by contrast, are generally seen as peripheral zones inhabited by communities who lowland state propaganda, and by extension much modern research, depicts as uncivilized and barbarous. In Mesopotamia, the proverbial cradle of civilization, the dichotomy between perspectives on highlands and lowlands is perhaps most stark, as virtually all archaeological and historical data are derived from lowland cities, while the flanking highlands of the Zagros Mountains remain nebulously blank on archaeological maps, presumed to have been home to pastoral nomads. Focusing on the Upper Diyala (Sirwan) River Valley in the Kurdistan Region of northern Iraq, this project employs a multi-scalar research strategy involving regional archaeological survey, excavations at the newly-discovered second millennium BC site of Khani Masi, and artifactual analyses of finds, including paleobotanical studies, stable isotope analysis of faunal materials, and organic residue analysis of ceramics. Results will reveal nuanced insights into settlement and land use patterns, pastoral strategies, craft production, and foodways, demonstrating the degree to which inhabitants of distinct environmental zones engaged in shared cultural practices, how these relationships transformed both lowland and highland groups as well as changed over the course of the third and second millennia BC.