The Correlation Between Domestic Status and Social Organization Form

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Dr. Elizabeth Stone, of Stony Brook University, along with colleagues from the University of Chicago, Stony Brook University, Oxford University and the University of Munich will undertake archaeological research to study the degree of continuity in domestic life at the site of Ur, located in southern Iraq, as the city was transformed from the imperial capital in the late third millennium to one of many small city states in the early second millennium B.C.E. Interpretations of Mesopotamian society, heavily influenced by the written record, have often interpreted the earlier level where the archaeological record is dominated by public buildings, as a very top down society, with some suggesting that much of the population were comparable to chattle slaves. However, the subsequent period is best known for its domestic areas which have yielded private letters and contracts and testify to considerable agency on the part of the larger population. This project aims to recover comparable data from domestic areas dating to both both periods to determine whether or not the differences in the current written record reflect real changes in society or the effect of differences in site formation. The research will provide basic insight into factors which underlie the rise and often subsequent decline of complex societies.These funds will be used to support the third and last season of work at the site. The uppermost architectural in Area 3 was owned by a general and indicates considerable construction investment. However the architecture in the overlying level incorporates few courses of baked brick and exhibits some of the narrowest walls and room widths known from the earlier excavations at Ur. The goal is to obtain a sequence of architectural, artifactual, faunal and floral data that can be compared with the contemporary data which can be compared between time periods.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.