Overview

Archaeological research on early villages has repeatedly shown that despite their small size these settlements were anything but simple. Excavations at the Late Neolithic and early Aeneolithic village of Monjukli Depe in the Kopet Dag foothills of Turkmenistan contribute to a picture of this complexity. General uniformities in house plans and material culture conceal underlying variability in material and social practices. Small-scale analyses of the preparation and use of space in buildings, courtyards, and outdoor areas yield insights into how and where village residents pursued their daily activities. Studies focused on interactions among villagers, animals, and plants demonstrate the multiple relationships between them in this settlement. Animals were sometimes penned in buildings or courtyards, and their dung served as a source of fuel. Macrobotanical and phytolith analyses offer indications of the main crops grown as well as the plant parts that people and animals brought, intentionally or not, into the village. They underscore long-term continuities as well as changes in the relationships among plants, animals, and people between the Neolithic and Aeneolithic occupations. A series of studies examine the stone, bone, and copper tools made and used by the villagers. Items of bodily adornment, including beads and copper pins, add a distinctly personal layer of life. Together, the assembled evidence offers a rich source of information on production activities but also on practices and materials that are otherwise largely invisible to the naked eye, from the adornment of the body, to the working of leather, fibers, and fabrics, to the harvesting of grain, to food preparation. Indirect connections to worlds beyond the village and the region are revealed via raw materials and objects from distant sources, including cherts and chalcedony, marine shells, lapis lazuli, and copper. The resulting picture extends and refines our knowledge about this ancient village, making visible the dynamics of quotidian village life beyond larger-scale similarities.

Full Product Details

9789464263718

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Susan Pollock held positions as professor of Western Asian Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University. She has long-standing research interests in village, early state, and urban societies in Western Asia and has conducted fieldwork in Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. She also researches more recent periods and has worked on sites of the 20th century in and around Berlin. Her research draws on feminist and political economic approaches to the study of the past, with specific attention to processes of subjectivation and the place of commensality in social life. She is the author of Ancient Mesopotamia: The Eden that Never Was (1999), editor of Between Feasts and Daily Meals. Toward an Archaeology of Commensal Spaces (2012), and co-editor (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Kamyar Abdi, 2010) of The 2003 Excavations at Tol-e Baši, Iran: Social Life in a Neolithic Village and Looking Closely. Excavations at Monjukli Depe, Turkmenistan, 2010 – 2014, Volume I (with Reinhard Bernbeck and Birgül Ögüt, 2019). Reinhard Bernbeck is Professor i.R. of Western Asian archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin and professor emeritus of Anthropology at Binghamton University. His interests include the prehistory of Iran, archaeological manifestations of repression, exploitation and suffering, and ideological dimensions of archaeological practice. He has carried out fieldwork in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. He has also investigated several prisoner-of-war and forced labor camps from the 20th century in Germany. He is the author of Materielle Spuren des nationalsozialistischen Terrors (2017), co-editor (with Randall H. McGuire) of Ideologies in Archaeology (2011), Subjects and Narratives in Archaeology (with Ruth van Dyke, 2015), Between Memory Sites and Memory Networks (with Kerstin Hofmann and Ulrike Sommer, 2017), and Containers of Change (with Olivier Nieuwenhuyse and Koen Berghuijs, 2023). Ilia Heit studied Prehistoric Archaeology, Geology, and Slavic Philology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany and received his PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin. His current research focuses on Neolithic and Chalcolithic communities in Central Asia and South Caucasus as well as theories and methods of Soviet archaeology. He is author of Dem Wandel auf der Spur. Bauen und Wohnen in Monjukli Depe und Umgebung, Turkmenistan.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available