The acquisition of collections of monumental art for museums in Europe and the US was the dominant impetus behind the earliest archaeological work in Mesopotamia from the 1860s through the early 1900s (collections in the British Museum, Louvre, and Metropolitan Museum of Art are testament to this approach). From c. 1920, archaeological work in the region shifted in focus, and the goal became a complete chronological categorization and material culture sequencing; pottery and architectural stratigraphy joined art as worthy of attention. In many ways, this goal persists in the present, but in the 1960s, wider questions of structure and process began to drive research. Archaeologists working in the prehistory of Mesopotamia are often at the forefront of theoretical debates (i. e., origins of agriculture, origins of states, and nature of chiefdoms). However, within Mesopotamian historical archaeology, our reconstruction of human actions and society is still compressed into and constrained by chronological phases, and the abundant textual material means that history often dictates to archaeology. Event-driven political narratives and institution-based explanations dominate archaeological approaches, and urban centers have most often been the focus of research programs. However, in survey and settlement archaeology, scholars working in Mesopotamia have been among the first to utilize satellite imagery and intensive survey approaches incorporating landscape and off-site features. Mesopotamia is fertile ground for exploration of ideas of empire, mechanisms of craft production, and urban-rural interaction.
World History
