Uch Tepe II: Technical Reports.

• Author: Schwartz, Glenn M.

The three mounds of Uch Tepe in the Hamrin basin northeast of Baghdad were excavated by a joint University of Chicago-University of Copenhagen salvage expedition in 1978 and 1979, under the direction of McGuire Gibson. The focus of the volume under review, which constitutes the second installment of the expedition's final report series, is on the small early third-millennium B.C. mound of Tell Razuk and its impressive "Round Building."

The book's first section is devoted to ceramic technical analyses. In his introductory remarks, I. Thuesen presents a theoretical model of possible modes of exchange of ceramic raw materials, technological expertise, shapes, and decoration; he also supplies a useful discussion of the chronological phasing of Scarlet Ware now discernible from the Hamrin results. The mineralogical report which follows analyzes the paste, paint and clay of the Razuk ceramics. One of the conclusions noted here is the marked homogeneity of the bulk chemical composition of samples from Razuk and other Mesopotamian sites, which precludes the recognition of ceramic exchange networks. This homogeneity suggests to the authors, following the work of W. Noll, that potters throughout Mesopotamia consistently selected a uniform calcareous ware because of its favorable compositional properties.

Somewhat more useful for identifying ceramic exchange patterns are the results of neutron activation analysis, which show samples from Hamrin and lower Diyala sites clustered far distant from the Tepe Farukhabad (Deh Luran plain) control group, implying ceramic interchange between the Hamrin and lower Diyala sites. Nevertheless, the pottery from Razuk itself, one of the later sites of the Hamrin cluster, seems to have been of primarily local manufacture, suggesting a reduction of ceramic exchange between the lower Diyala and the Hamrin in ED II. This section of the publication would have profited from a clearer articulation of the substantive issues involved--e.g.: what hypotheses were to be tested, what models of exchange were to be considered, what the significance of the results may have been.

Reports on the compressive strength test of a mudbrick from the Razuk Round Building and the structural analysis of one of the building's corbelled vaults...