Only one aspect of fieldwork remains universal and timeless: financial shortage, a theme common to virtually every excavation report’s preface. In other respects, however, archaeological projects initiated in the Middle East during the past fifty years have followed different agendas from those preceding World War II, and have been carried out under more restrictive conditions. Superficial explanations behind these changes involve practical issues. Field seasons, on average, became shorter once academics, who are constrained by university calendars, replaced institute - and museum-sponsored teams as the majority force engaged in excavations. University-based projects also embraced the mission of training students in fieldwork and field-related research. This aim toward instruction speeded up technical improvements, bringing excavating, sampling, and recording practices to much higher standards. Field teams accordingly expanded to include a battery of specialists and site supervisors several times more numerous than the handful recommended by Parrot, at greater expense to transport, house, and feed. The local labor force was reduced as a result of such developments.
These factors shifted the scale of excavation toward smaller trenches and a slower pace. Other types of restrictions also played an important role in modifying the nature of fieldwork. A heightened conscience about preserving sites rather than destroying them led to the argument that soundings and surveys should substitute for excav-ation,2 although it is today again recognized that they generate distinct and complementary information (Matthews 2003: 34-5). Industrialization, road work, and hydroelectric dam construction in the Middle East have increased the pressure for salvage projects, which detract from a free choice of site, based on research interests, by focusing efforts instead on short-term and largely random investigations. Much good and unexpected data have emerged from these, but they have also diverted earlier patterns of research.
Underlying these structural changes, however, is a profound shift in perspective within the archaeological discipline itself. I will not even summarize the many theoretical concerns that have rocked the archaeological establishment during these six decades. They belong - in one activist’s words - to an internal dialogue that interests only the profession (Trigger 1989: 2, citing Binford). It is enough to say that they query what archaeology does or does not do, particularly in its aims at explanation. One consequence for Near Eastern archaeology has been a preference for prehistoric sites through the Protoliterate period, because they may answer fundamental issues about transformations in the human condition: the invention of farming and animal-breeding, the move from village to urban life, or the development of state systems. For historic periods, a similar turn toward ‘‘blue-collar’’ research led to concentrating on private housing rather than monumental buildings, and on small sites instead of urban centers. To investigate diachronic change and transitions, small, multi-phase soundings replaced broad exposures, so that contrasts from one period to the next could be sampled and highlighted.
Another result of post-World War II fieldwork agendas has been a renewed awareness that archaeological data and historical data produce two distinct classes of information, and therefore require two different styles of research questions in archaeology. The debate is an old one, a sign that its seeds rest at the very core of archaeology as a discipline. It lies behind the American ‘‘New Archeology’’ [sic] movement of the 1960s, spearheaded by L. Binford, and it resurfaced in the 1990s when the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted even its archaeologists to query the premises behind their research design (Klejn 1993). The force of this ideological rift among archaeologists was vividly expressed by the title Renfrew chose for his centenary lecture at the Archaeological Institute of America: ‘‘The Great Tradition versus the Great Divide’’ (1980). Despite the many reasonable arguments urging cooperation and peace between the two factions in the archaeological establishment, they continue to view each other’s basic approaches with misgiving.
Whatever their position on this debate, it has led excavators in the Middle East to sheer away from investigating historical problems, since they cannot be formulated - in the present scientific view - as relevant research questions except when set against a much wider backdrop. Woolley’s declaration that ‘‘a nameless ruin was none other than Ur, so-called Ur of the Chaldees, ‘the home of Abraham’ ’’ (1930: 14) would not give him either a viable research proposal or funding were his excavations to begin today! It will then hardly come as a surprise that historians of the Ancient Near East find these recent projects less suitable to their purpose, when the archaeologists themselves are questioning whether material culture has anything to do with history.
Still, there is much in current fieldwork that the Ancient Near Eastern historian can apply directly. Projects make increasing use of remote-sensing and aerial techniques to compensate for limited horizontal exposures. They can recover entire and extensive site plans when conditions are favorable: brilliant examples spanning three millennia are Titris Hoyiik in southeastern Turkey (Matney and Algaze 1995; Algaze et al. 1996), the Old Babylonian city Mashkan-Shapir (Stone and Zimansky 1992), and the Late Iron Age Median site at Kerkenes Dag, in north central Turkey (Summers 2000). Judicious selection of which features from the geophysical plan to excavate can also produce results worthy of archaeology’s heroic age, but using meticulous technical standards. Thus ten seasons at Kusakli, the Hittite city of Sarissa, have uncovered several monumental temples and administrative buildings, residential quarters, workshops, the fortification wall and its gates, and an extramural sanctuary - thanks to geoelectrical and geomagnetic surveys that outlined where these buildings lay underneath the ground surface (Muller-Karpe 2002a, 2002b). This ongoing project on the northeastern frontier of the Hittite state has definitively dispelled the established view that only the Hittite capital Hattusha could pretend to urban status. Kusakli’s impact on historical issues concerning the Hittites is as considerable as on archaeological ones.
A second characteristic of recent fieldwork is that it produces clear data on environment, subsistence, and technology, three topics of immediate relevance to ancient economies. Systematic collection and analysis of cereal and faunal remains from well-defined archaeological contexts can provide direct evidence for situations inferred from texts, while relating them to a broader geographical scale. For example, investigations at Early Bronze Tell al-Raqa’i and Tell ‘Atij in northeastern Syria concluded - by evaluating architectural and botanical findings in tandem - that these small early-to-mid-third millennium bce sites served as regional centers for storing cereals (Schwartz and Klucas 1998; Fortin 1998). The social and political administration behind such centers would thus parallel the structure in contemporary Sumer, although no written sources have (as yet) been found to suggest this. Comparable studies on second millennium sites in the region have provided urban centers like Mari with way-stations for agricultural produce (Del Olmo Lete and Montero Fenollds 1998), and documented the shift from Middle Bronze Mari to Late Bronze Terqa for control of the central Euphrates valley’s mixed urban, farming, and nomadic economies (Rouault 1998). Since archives tend to be locality-specific and their distribution sporadic, the archaeological record can supply a fuller and more comprehensive picture from which to generalize than the textual one alone.
Questions involving ancient industries can also benefit from the many studies that archaeologists routinely conduct on ceramics, metallurgy, and other materials. Here too, such information fills gaps in the written record, and can redress its biases. At the simplest level, the contents of ordinary households illustrate facets of economic life that lay outside the spheres of official record-keeping, but were nonetheless fully connected to the existing system. The manufacture of pottery on a wheel, which occurred in southern Mesopotamia from the Protoliterate period onward, was a specialized industry in the hands of trained craftsmen. Obvious signs of mass-production are the homogeneity and narrow range of vessel types that characterized Sumerian and Babylonian ceramics over centuries and even millennia (Potts 1997: 150-62). The actual mechanism through which tableware and storage jars were acquired by individuals may be variously imagined, but it certainly involved a supplier - the potter’s workshop - and a purchaser. Thus, for the reconstruction of Mesopotamian economic systems after 3400 bce, any proposal that assumes ordinary families were self-sufficient, even to making their own pottery (for example, Renger 1984: 88), runs in direct contradiction to archaeological realities, and can be considered flawed in its basic premise. In historical contexts where there is no written documentation preserved about economic affairs, the archaeological record provides the only evidence. During the Late Bronze Hittite Empire, for example, ceramics and other products show that highly standardized industries exerted a centralizing control in order to ensure economic stability over the entire territory (Ertem, Summers, and Demirci 1998; Gates 2001).
The historian may find the format in which this class of archaeological data is presented more difficult to approach and adapt than excavation summaries. Nonetheless, it remains essential corroborative evidence for any text-based discussion of economic topics, just as the texts themselves supply details which the archaeologist should consult (Potts 1997: vii).
World History
