Prehistory, by definition, belongs to the discipline of archaeology, since it involves reconstructing ancient cultures on the strength of their material remains, without the help of written commentary. But the division between the prehistoric and historic periods in the Near East is - for the archaeologist - a largely artificial boundary. Roots for its early historical developments extend back into prehistoric times. The Late Ubaid phase (4500-3500 bce) presents many of the characteristics that qualified Protoliterate Sumer for statehood: monumental buildings laid out on a fixed architectural standard, long-distance trade, implantation of South Mesopotamian types (and populations?) in foreign lands, specialized industries, wide cultural distribution patterns, and simple record-keeping devices (Matthews 2003: 102-8). Should the two not be linked into a continuum with several stages, rather than split into separate entities by archaeologists and historians both?
More to the point, however, is the fact that most archaeological contexts, whatever their period, represent ahistoric or parahistoric (almost historic) entities peripheral to, or entirely dissociated from, any relevant framework of events and persons. Regardless of whether a historic or prehistoric setting is concerned, time in the archaeological sense is calculated in units of multiple generations (such as three generations for the average life-span of a house), or in larger blocks of centuries or millennia for cultural phases (Smith 1992). What emerges from the archaeological past, therefore, is a picture of societies within their environment - Braudel’s mentalities and patterns - occasionally punctuated by historical detail that gives an additional dimension to the picture.
The analytical techniques used by archaeology are applied in the same way to sites and regions before and after writing appears in the Near East. The only pertinent distinction between the two is whether they speak solely through the words of archaeologists, or whether some members of those ancient societies also manage to express themselves verbally. The example most often cited to illustrate the importance of written testimonials in interpreting an archaeological context is the case of the
Assyrian businessmen who resided in central Anatolia from the nineteenth to seventeenth centuries bce, and wrote their correspondence and contracts on clay tablets (Veenhof 1995; Matthews 2003: 120). Their presence is attested at KUltepe, where excavations have exposed the largest area of a neighborhood in which they lived, and in smaller communities at Bogazkcly and Ali§ar. They assimilated completely into local culture: house architecture, tableware, even the deities represented on their seals were Anatolian. The only material clues to their presence at these sites are their tablets, their use of cylinder seals instead of stamp seals, and their burials inside houses. Contemporary AcemhoyUk and KarahoyUk-Konya, although in close communication with Kultepe, produced no tablets and thus no trace of whether foreigners were settled there too. However, the letters of these Assyrian businessmen tell a different (and sadly human) story. Far from acknowledging that they had ‘‘gone native’’ by adopting an Anatolian lifestyle, making a common practice of taking local women as wives, raising their children, and worshiping their gods, they referred to their hosts in strictly pejorative terms and avoided introducing any borrowed words into their written language (Veenhof 1977: 110, 1982: 150-4).3 If we had only their archives from Assur (which have in fact not been recovered), and did not know the realities of their entrenchment in Anatolian society, our impressions of their activities and interactions would again be incorrect. A balanced perspective drawn from a social setting revealed through archaeology, and from individual commentaries documented in writing, achieves a closer accuracy.
World History
