Early Bronze Age Hamoukar: A Settlement Biography

Around 2600 BC, a handful of settlements across northern Mesopotamia expanded rapidly in size, as part of a now well known process of secondary urbanization (or reurbanization). This dissertation refocuses the study of this phenomenon by turning attention away from broad, regional processes and, instead, foregrounding local-scale transformations and “settlement biographies.” The focus is Tell Hamoukar, one of the largest Early Bronze Age settlements in northern Mesopotamia. Excavations at Hamoukar between 2008 and 2010 uncovered evidence for three phases of occupation in the site’s lower town, beginning with settlement expansion near the end of the Ninevite 5 period and ending with a collapse during the Akkadian/post-Akkadian period (c. 2600-2200 BC). At Hamoukar, the package of features normally associated with urbanization – settlement expansion, a complex settlement hierarchy, labor and craft specialization, monumental architecture, centralized food production, etc. – did not emerge suddenly and in lock-step. To the contrary, a detailed examination of architecture, ceramics, faunal remains, glyptic, and burials in the lower town at Hamoukar reveals that these “urban” features developed over an extended period of time and in a series of discontinuous and protracted stages. When compared with other contemporary settlements in the region, the Early Bronze Age occupation at Hamoukar does display some macro-level similarities – e.g. in the sudden expansion of settlement and in regional settlement patterns – but this is where the similarities end. Whatever the driving forces, the process of “reurbanization” that was taking place across northern Mesopotamia was by no means a uniform process.