Excavations at Tell Brak: Exploring an Upper Mesopotamian Regional Centre, 1994-1996, vol. 4.

• Author: Schwartz, Glenn M.
• Position: Book Review

Excavations at Tell Brak, vol. 4: Exploring an Upper Mesopotamian Regional Centre, 1994-1996. Edited by ROGER MATTHEWS. McDonald Institute Monographs. London: BRITISH SCHOOL OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN IRAQ, 2003. Pp. xviii + 446, illus. $135. [Distributed in North America by David Brown Book Co., Oakville, Conn.]

After more than twenty years of excavation, the British field project at Tell Brak under the direction of David Oates began producing a sequence of final reports in 1997, of which the present volume is the third to appear. While the first two volumes reported on excavation seasons supervised by David and Joan Oates, the report under review covers three campaigns (1994-96) in which Roger Matthews was field director. As with the first two volumes, the reports in this book are written by a diversity of excavation supervisors and specialists.

Brak, located in the southern margins of the Khabur triangle of modern northeast Syria, is one of the foremost--and most formidable--tells of upper Mesopotamia. Despite the many years of excavation, the sheer immensity of the mound has ensured that only a very small sample of its bulk has been studied intensively. Confronting this predicament, Matthews adopted a two-pronged strategy. First, he aimed to investigate under-explored periods at the site, particularly the early fourth and early third millennia B.C. In order to find remains of the targeted periods, Matthews focused on the mound slopes, where a chronological sequence could be identified by the materials on the surface; often, surface materials mirrored subsurface contexts faithfully, with a sequence of progressively earlier periods identifiable by the changing styles of surface sherds as one descended the mound slope. The second goal was to devote particular attention to the recovery and analysis of environmental and ecofactual data, procedures under-represented in earlier seasons at Brak.

The excavations were primarily diachronic in focus, documenting sequences of strata from trenches relatively limited in area (16-100 sq m) and thus usually yielding only fragments of walls or architectural units. A large and potentially very useful selection of carbon-14 dates are provided here, although it is regrettable that in many cases, the nature of the context from which they derived is not specified.

Matthews' team concentrated primarily on three slopes, HS (northwest), HF (northeast), and HL (southeast). For late fifth- and early fourth-millennium...