Elizabeth Stone

• Stony Brook University

There is no question that traditional cities, including most urban centers studied by archaeologists, are and were typically sub‐divided into numerous face‐to‐face communities or neighborhoods. However, the large size of even the smallest of these urban centers impedes the ability of archaeologists to generate the data needed for their full assessm...

This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/nature24646. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25992.pdf.

How wealth is distributed among households provides insight into the fundamental characters of societies and the opportunities they afford for social mobility. However, economic inequality has been hard to study in ancient societies for which we do not have written records, which adds to the challenge of placing current wealth disparities into a lo...

More than eighty years after Woolley's departure, the authors have initiated excavations in Mesopotamia's most celebrated residential district, Ur's Area AH. Did private housing change significantly as Ur went from the capital of a bureaucratic empire under its Third Dynasty to a city state in the Isin-Larsa period? The authors opened four areas, t...

Even by the depressing standards of modern archaeological vandalism, the pillaging of sites in Iraq that followed the demise of the Saddam regime was appalling in its scale and intensity. Iraq had experienced site looting in the past- indeed it is largely as a result of this activity that the world's museums have Mesopotamian collections, but in th...

In large arid floodplains, like that of southern Iraq, the rise of the water table associated with irrigation can result in surface salt concentrations over the remains of subsurface architecture. These traces are visible only from the air but are sometimes captured by commercially available submeter pixel imagery. This article describes the method...

The recent introduction of irrigation around the site of Mashkan-shapir, together with the availability of high resolution satellite imagery, has resulted in the preservation of architectural traces which could not be recovered when the site was researched between 1987 and 1990. In spite of recent looting, these traces have allowed the identificati...

The archaeological sites of Iraq, precious for their bearing on human history, became especially vulnerable to looters during two wars. Much of the looting evidence has been anecdotal up to now, but here satellite imagery has been employed to show which sites were looted and when. Sites of all sizes from late Uruk to early Islamic were targeted for...

The proposal to develop an Iraqi-British project to protect and promote cultural heritage in Southern Iraq was first mooted at a lunch in the British Museum on 24 September 2007, involving Major-General Barney White-Spunner, Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, and John Curtis, Keeper...

Iraqi Landscapes and Mesopotamian SettlementSourcesCities – Houses and HouseholdsCities – Temples and PalacesThe Urban LandscapeThe Mesopotamian CityCity and Countryside in Mesopotamia

A total of 275 pottery and clay samples from Urartian period sites in eastern Anatolia were analyzed by INAA. The pottery sample originates primarily from the fortress and Outer Town at Ayanis and also includes samples from nearby sites in the Lake Van basin. A small sample of pottery from Bastam, a contemporary Urartian fortress in northwest Iran,...

Mesopotamian history tends to be phrased in terms of stages: Early Dynastic city-states replaced by imperial Akkad, bureaucratic Ur III replaced by the more individualistic Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian periods thanks to the influence of the Amorites, etc. Lost in this process is a sense of the longue durée of Mesopotamian civilization, the basic a...

Slabs and fragments of gray-black vesicular "rock," superficially resembling natural basalt but distinctive in chemistry and mineralogy, were excavated at the second-millennium B.C. Mesopotamian city of Mashkan-shapir, about 80 kilometers south of Baghdad, Iraq. Most of this material appears to have been deliberately manufactured by the melting and...

Mashkan—shapir was for a brief time one of the most important cities in the world. Its remains challenge traditional notions of power distribution in early urban society

The second (1988–1989) and third (1990) seasons of excavation and survey at the 2nd-millennium B.C. urban site of Tell Abu Duwari (ancient Mashkan-shapir), Iraq, have yielded important new evidence on the organization of ancient Mesopotamian cities. A combination of aerial and surface survey has provided a broad overview of the differing functional...

The distribution of designs on Mesopotamian terracottas can provide clues to the relationship between symbols and meaning at different localities. Unlike other Mesopotamian terracottas whose iconography reflects pan-Mesopotamian beliefs, the designs on model chariots are site-specific. While Mesopotamian religious symbols should probably be interpr...

The earliest textual references to Mashkan-shapir depict a town with humble origins. During the first quarter of the second millennium B.C.E., however, Mashkan-shapir became one of the most prominent cities in Mesopotamia because of its location at the northernmost point where the systems of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers converged sufficiently to...

Tell Abu Duwari, located in Iraq, comprises the remains of a large (56 ha), primarily single-period city dating to the early second millennium B.C. It provides a unique opportunity for investigating the organization of an ancient Mesopotamian city, because both its lack of overburden and the presence of numerous surface indicators make possible, wi...