Social Complexity at the Time of Urbanization: A ‘Grave’ Perspective — Late Pottery Neolithic to Early Bronze Age Northern Mesopotamia (6400-2000 BCE)

This work focuses on the transition from the Late Pottery Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age in Mesopotamia (6400-200 BCE), with a particular emphasis on North Mesopotamian developments. I use mortuary data from this time period in order to understand how people were buried and to what extent these practices reflected social structures as understood from the rest of the archaeological record. Cortical bone thickness and density are examined in concert with the mortuary data in order to understand long-term changes in people’s mobility and/or activity patterns, as well as internal structures that differentiated between the sexes.

This inquiry is especially framed in the context of urbanization that occurred once during the middle of the 4^th Millennium BCE and once again in the middle of the 3^rd. How mortuary practices and the human body were influenced by the changing dynamics of shifts in settlement patterns, use of space, and the reduced mobility of people who had specialized tasks to perform is at the hearth of this study. Thus, I am examining how social differentiation is or is not reflected in the ritualized behavior of burying the dead through the lens of 3000 years, and how we can possibly learn about these changes by employing human long bone cortical studies.

In order to contextualize my findings, I model North/South Mesopotamian interactions, North Mesopotamian social organization, and elite power as a heterarchical system. The use of heterarchy instead of hierarchical to characterize northern Mesopotamian societies allows me to reconcile burial patterns that are observed, explain the lack or presence of wealth in certain graves, and link these findings to the rest of the archaeological record. Heterarchy gives a richer understanding into why societies go through phases of centralization, decentralization, and collapse and allows for a more flexible approach by which to investigate social complexity.