TALK: The Global and the Local:
Comparing the Dynamics of Interaction
in Ubaid and Uruk Mesopotamia
Gil Stein (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago)
Thursday, May 3 / 3:00 PM / HSSB 4020
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During the fifth and fourth millennia BC, Mesopotamian cultural influences spread widely into neighboring regions of the Near East. The first of these expansionary episodes took place in the Ubaid period, a time characterized by the emergence of the earliest chiefdoms and social ranking systems. The second occurred as part of the process of urbanization and state formation in the Uruk period of the 4th millennium. Both of these horizon styles have been commonly interpreted as episodes of Mesopotamian colonization in neighboring zones. This presentation compares the archaeological evidence for the Ubaid and Uruk expansions and suggests that they in fact represent two fundamentally different expansionary dynamics and processes of inter-regional interaction.
Gil Stein is an archaeologist whose fieldwork has investigated early civilizations on two continents and whose theoretical writings examine colonialism. Stein has excavated in Arizona, New Mexico and Syria, and since 1981, in Turkey. From 1992 through 1997, he directed excavations at Hacinebi, a Mesopotamian colony in Turkey, which is part of the world's first-known colonial system. Comparing what he knew of Hacinebi with the ideas about colonialism that were then current led Stein to write Rethinking World Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia (University of Arizona Press, 1999) to look at the world's earliest colonial system and see how it was different from the modern models. He also is the author of The Archaeology of Colonial Encounters: Comparative Perspectives (School of American Research Press, 2005).
Sponsored by the IHC's Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group
