Upon This Foundation: The Ubaid Reconsidered, Proceedings from the Ubaid Symposium, Elsinore May 30th-June 1st 1988.

• Author: McClellan, Thomas L.

The volume resulting from the Elsinore conference of the Ubaid consists of 17 papers, discussion generated by them, an introduction and two conclusions (the first by senior scholars H. T. Wright and R. McC. Adams and the second by the volume editors). The uniformly high quality of the papers and follow-up discussions, which were always lively and at times of greater interest than the papers themselves, makes this volume one of the more successful conference proceedings to be published in recent years and provides not only a fresh look at the Ubaid period but a glimpse at the way anthropological archaeologists and prehistorians currently work and think.

The papers are grouped into five sections: villages, society, economics and politics, northern Ubaid, and adjacent regions. Other arrangements might have organized them under the headings of domestic architecture, funerary customs, ceramic studies, and evolutionary reconstructions. Just as the emphasis on architecture and funerary practices was evident so was the absence of topics such as demographics and settlement patterns, subsistence strategies, and the role of irrigation and dryland farming; in their concluding remarks the senior scholars noted these absences too.

The thematic aim of the conference was to recognize the importance of the Ubaid culture, which lies between two great turning points in the evolutionary sequence of mankind: the development of agriculture not too much earlier than the beginning of Ubaid and the emergence of states and urban centers in the Uruk period immediately following the Ubaid. It is clear, the editors suggest, that the real importance of the Ubaid cannot be appreciated apart from its transitional role on the "dynamic unfolding process" and as the foundation upon which subsequent greater human achievements were built.

The papers reflect new data and interpretations that have been emerging in the field during the past decade. Huot reviews changes between early and late levels at Tell Oueili, which now provides the best sequence in lower Mesopotamia for the Ubaid. Roaf continues his detailed analysis of a single structure at Tell Madhhur, which provides one of the earliest, best-preserved and best-documented tripartite buildings in early Mesopotamian history. Archaeological work outside the "heartland" is producing important new data regarding Ubaid cultures (see Berman and Pollock on the Susiana plain, Henrickson on the central Zagros highlands, Frifelt on...