Fragile Images: Clay Media in Early Iran - the materiality and imagery of administrative practices in the Late Chalcolithic to Early Bronze Age (FRIMCLAY)

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Project FRIMCLAY aims to investigate the formation and functioning of early institutionalized political and economic systems in mid 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE Iran through a holistic study of the administrative media employed to control the flow of goods, raw materials and labor, namely sealings and script impressed onto clay and the seals used for this practice. The targeted period encapsulates the period from the moment when the early polities of the Uruk model in the lowlands of Iraq and Khuzestan reached out to their highland neighbors in a quest for raw material and labor force (mid-late Uruk period, c. 3700-3350 BCE), and the subsequent adaptation of systems of economic control in the Iranian highlands through the formation of a network of centralized proto-urban polities in the proto-Elamite period (c. 3350-2800 BCE). Neither the nature of the early contacts between the Uruk centers and their highland neighbors nor the following social transformation marking the proto-Elamite period are well understood, but a necessity to ensure access to resources seems to be at its core. This project therefore proposes to adopt a practice-oriented focus on their media of notation and thus, control over resources. A diachronic and supra-regional perspective is expected to open a differentiated view onto local practices and developments and thus to allow the recognition of hidden but meaningful diversity. By addressing these questions through an innovative multi-proxy analysis of the media of control and self-representation employed by the early centralized powers, administrative devices made from clay such as sealings applied to clay locks from containers and doors, inscribed and sealed clay tablets, as well as the stamp and cylinder seals proper applied to the clay media, this project will contribute important new perspectives on the conceptualization and practical implementation of early modes of social and economic hierarchies. We intend to study relevant collections of clay administrative media from the archaeological sites of Susa, Sialk, Godin, Malyan, Yahya, and other sites in Iran, and to compare these with materials from Uruk and Fara in a second step. Our methodology combines materiality and practice approaches as well as iconographic analyses and addresses the material qualities of the clay media, the administrative practices in the usage and sealing of clay devices, and the iconography employed by individuals and institutions in their self-representation.