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Urbanism

"The state... is not an object...(but) an ideological project. It is first and foremost an exercise in legitimation... It conceals real history and relations of subjection behind an a-historical mask of legitimative illusion... The real official secret, however, is the secret of the non-existence of the state"
Abrams 1988: 76-77.

The discourses on the state and state formation have dominated archaeological explorations of Early Mesopotamia in association with the development of social and bureaucratic complexity, agricultural technologies, monumental architecture, urbanization, long distance trade, colonization and the development of writing. Archaeological evidence from the material worlds of the early Near East (especially during the 4th and 3rd millennia BC) have been written under narratives of the state from chiefdoms to city-states and to empires, while the artifacts, texts and spaces of the past were painstakingly linked to the ideologies, power structures and political economies of the state. This course unpacks this preoccupation with states and power as a modernist scholarly practice and deconstruct its instrumentalizations of the material pasts. We will consider the more recent explicit postcolonial/postprocessual distancing of academic interests from such frames of reference, and explore alternative paradigms that challenge neo-evolutionary narratives of the state and social complexity. Turning the macro models of the state on their head, we will focus on how micro level material practices constitute the social world, and in what ways an explicitly archaeological approach can contribute to the critique of those macro models. Exploring various case studies from the ancient Near East, questions of social practices and social change, domination and resistance, collectivity, materiality and agency, political landscapes and state spectacles will be brought up in our discussions, while focusing primarily on Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Levant from 9000 BC to approximately 2000 BC.