Under the supervision of Dr. Kathleen Morrison, Melissa Rosenzweig will analyze botanical data gathered from archaeological excavations (led by Dr. Timothy Matney) at Ziyaret Tepe, site of the Late Assyrian garrison of Tu'han in southeastern Anatolia. Part of a network of fortresses intended to support Assyria's expansion into northern territories, Tu'han was an important provincial center for Assyrian imperialism between 900 and 600 BCE. At its zenith, the site extended 32 hectares and included upper and lower city habitations, large administrative structures, a fortified city wall, and moat. Situated upon the southern bank of the Tigris River, Ziyaret Tepe and contemporary sites in the region's river valleys are understood to have been occupied by the Late Assyrians in an effort to develop agricultural surpluses for the growing urban populations in Assyria's heartland. However, little is known about the processes by which the Assyrians intensified agriculture in this region, or how these practices affected the local environment and communities. Therefore, this project will utilize botanical artifacts to study changes in agricultural production and consumption over time at Ziyaret Tepe, in an effort to clarify the mechanics and consequences of Assyrian imperialism for this region and time period.
This study will use three lines of environmental evidence to reconstruct the agricultural history of Ziyaret Tepe and its surroundings. From the site itself, macrobotanical remains of charred wood, seeds, nuts, and fruits collected by excavation will be examined in order to identify the crops grown and used over time at Ziyaret Tepe. At a broader scale, more regional and temporal depth into the environmental history of the Upper Tigris River Valley will come from trace element and pollen analyses of sediment cores extracted from a lake 10km from Ziyaret Tepe. The organic materials captured in these cores will reveal botanical signatures of human land-use practices over several thousand years, and help reconstruct a record of climate and vegetation in the region. Finally, in order to delineate the extent of land and resources utilized by inhabitants of Ziyaret Tepe, this project incorporates an internationally-coordinated landscape survey, designed to detect elements of settlement, farming, and irrigation around the ancient site. From these various sources of data, patterns in both everyday and long-term practices of agricultural production and consumption will be recovered. Because the negotiation of resources is a critical component of socio-political relations and land management, this information on agricultural strategies will help discern the impact of Assyrian agrarian control on both the people and the environment of ancient southeastern Anatolia.
The proposed research will make a significant contribution toward understanding ancient political ecologies of agrarian sites under imperial government. In addition, this study is one component of a large-scale, international effort to preserve data and curated materials of the Upper Tigris River Valley prior to the construction of the Ilýsu Dam (ca. 2016), at the behest of Turkish authorities. Regular reports on the findings of this research will be made available to the Turkish Ministry of Culture, and the results of the study will be presented in Ms. Rosenzweig's Ph.D. dissertation and submitted for publication in peer-reviewed journals. Outreach and educational efforts also include public presentations on the on-going excavations, in Turkish, for the local residents of Ziyaret Tepe.
NSF award 1039150 generously supported the dissertation "Imperial Environments: The Politics of Agricultural Practice at Ziyaret Tepe, Turkey in the First Millennium BCE" (University of Chicago), an archaeological study of transformations in agricultural practice over time and space at the site of Ziyaret Tepe, an ancient provincial center of the Late Assyrian empire, and how these changes relate to the political agenda of the Late Assyrian empire. The dissertation is based on 24 months of accumulated fieldwork and archaeobotanical analysis conducted on-site at Ziyaret Tepe, at the archaeobotany laboratory of the British Institute at Ankara, Turkey, and at the paleoecology laboratory at the University of Chicago. This study recommends a treatment of political and agricultural relations that acknowledges the manifold social aspects of resource management and recognizes that the agricultural processes that took place at Ziyaret Tepe and elsewhere in the Assyrian empire between imperial administrators and subjects who worked the land were profoundly anthropogenic and politically charged. The research conducted includes the macrobotanical analysis of 200 flotation samples collected on-site at Ziyaret Tepe, a 32-hectare multi-period tell in the Diyarbak?r Province of southeastern Turkey. The research design also included the collection the regional environmental information acquired from lake sediment cores drawn in the vicinity of Ziyaret Tepe. Two sediment cores were extracted from lakes within 25 km of Ziyaret Tepe: one from Sabun Gölü, another from Ar?kl? Gölü. Unfortunately, neither core contained well-preserved pollen grains, making the planned palynological analysis of ancient vegetation untenable. Nonetheless, the research did result in a great deal of archaeobotanical data for interpretation. Significantly, the study provides evidence that imperial administrators did not control the people and environments in their annexed lands with the hegemony portrayed within Assyria-centric sources. Instead the archaeobotanical data, read against administrative cuneiform texts available from both the site itself and the central archives of the state, reveal land management practices indicative of local agency and administrative compromise that counter the state narrative of successful domination regardless of community or landscape. For example, Late Assyrian rulers deployed a platform of agrarian reform in their provinces that relied upon an imperial discourse of untouched lands without prior claims. However, the archaeobotanical record from Ziyaret Tepe uncovers robust and diverse agricultural practices extending back to the late third millennium founding of the site. Likewise, administrative documents depict a Late Assyrian preoccupation with cereal production and irrigation techniques, but plant remains from the site, especially the profile(s) of weedy plants, allude to an important and complex pastoral system that underpinned the material conditions of imperialism in the region. In fact, it appears that the maintenance of forage and fodder for animal provisioning consumed as much, if not more, of land managers' efforts as the production of crops for human consumption. The administrative texts from Late Assyria project particular imperial environments, viz. landscapes of realized produce ready for accounting and collection. But the plant remains from Ziyaret Tepe remind us of the processes behind these products, and indicate that Late Assyrian land managers had to be flexible and allow alternative agrarian strategies in the face of resistance from either the environment, imperial subjects, or both. These findings capture those very local characteristics that the Late Assyrian programs attempted to efface, and engenders a greater appreciation for the give-and-take of human-environment interactions that the Late Assyrian authorities preferred to cast as a unidirectional relationship of human control over nature.
