The excavations at Başur Höyük have brought to light the socioeconomic reorganization of communities at the frontier of North Mesopotamia after the Late Uruk Period. By focusing on the data obtained from Başur Höyük, the paper presents a brief look at the Upper Tigris Region with the help of the material data. It seems that the Upper Tigris Region became an interaction zone between the plains of the south and the mountains of the north for different cultural and ethnic components. The paper aims to open the debate on the role various ethnic and cultural communities may have played in the establishment of ‘powerful’ political and socioeconomic organization at Başur Höyük at the beginning of the third millennium.

The works, which have been continued within the scope of the Ilısu Dam and HEPP Projects over the last twenty years, have shown that the Upper Tigris Region had also an advanced organization in terms of metallurgical activities. Especially at the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC, Arslantepe in the Upper Euphrates Region and Başur Höyük in the Upper Tigris Region (fig. 1) are the key settlements for their regions to understand the developments’ dynamics because they had some complex funerary customs such as human sacrifice and their extraordinary metalwork represented a difference which had not been seen in any other contemporary settlement. In this paper, we aim to focus on the significance of metal for the local communities by taking in hand the tombs and rich metal objects in burial contexts dated to the beginnings of the 3rd millennium BC revealed at Arslantepe and Başur Höyük located in these two regions rich in terms of raw material.

Excavations within the scope of the Ilısu Dam and HEPP Project in the Upper Tigris Region indicate that the region did not witness complexities such as city-states, large settlements, and hierarchical settlement systems throughout the Bronze Age, unlike the neighboring regions of Euphrates and Khabur. Instead of a city-centric system and settlement hierarchy, a model made up of small- and medium-sized settlements in association with the heterarchical and autonomous organizations is understood. It appears that the region is not only in close contact with the neighboring cultures, but also witnesses different social structures with complex internal dynamics. This study tries to address these dynamics that led to socioeconomic diversity in the Upper Tigris Region. In accordance with this purpose, this intraregional consideration briefly summarizes the state of the Bronze Age in the Upper Tigris Region according to the data obtained from archaeological excavations and suggests various socio-economic organizations for the phases of the Bronze Age.