The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir.

AuthorRichardson, Seth

The Anatomy of a Mesopotamian City: Survey and Soundings at Mashkan-shapir. By ELIZABETH C. STONE and PAUL ZIMANSKY. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2004. Pp. xviii + 504, illus. $69.50.

An archaeological expedition to Maskan-sapir: eighty-four surveyed hectares, five months of excavation, four "small" soundings, one ongoing international war, and fourteen years elapsing between the close of fieldwork and the publication of the major 504-page report on a site which, by press-time, no longer existed thanks to wholesale looting. A bittersweet success, Stone and Zimansky's report was forced over the long term to reinvent its short-term surface survey strategy as a kind of salvage archaeology.

The choice of Maskan-sapir was intended to compensate for an enduring problem in Mesopotamian archaeology, our inability to gain a "snapshot" of how a Babylonian city was laid out in its entirety "in one place, at one time"--and what that urban form indicated about its social and economic life. (Perhaps only one greater outstanding need exists: the ongoing lack of excavated non-urban sites.) In finding a generally even distribution of objects across the site betokening status, luxury, and production, the authors conclude that a "heterarchical" socio-economic arrangement prevailed at the intrasite level, with a "lack of distinction between the residential areas of rich and poor" (p. 380). This finding would contradict models in which social inequality and institutional dominance were inscribed on the Mesopotamian urban landscape through the segregation of elites from non-elites in different city quarters.

Whether one accepts the excavators' conclusion depends on the extent to which one accepts the premise of the site's typicality, a question with which the authors themselves occasionally wrestle (pp. 41-42, 374). The selection of a (more or less) single-period occupation was indisputably a necessary condition of being able to take such a "snapshot." But in this case the selection also brings with it some features rather atypical of a classic south-Mesopotamian city: it developed very rapidly from a 3 ha. village in Ur III times to a settlement twenty times larger under official sponsorship; it had little in the way of institutional architecture (pace Nergal); it sat outside the densely settled alluvial plain in a sparsely inhabited hinterland; and it acted as a frontier "outpost" of the Larsa dynasts.

The site also seems heavy on royal inscriptions but...

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