Project Details
Projekt
Mobile villages and dynamic landscapes: the Varamin Plain from the late 5th to the early 3rd mill. BCE PART 2: Excavations at Tell Begum in the Shahrizor Plain
Applicant
Professor Dr. Reinhard Bernbeck
Subject Area
Egyptology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Term
since 2019
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 424609853
The second phase of the project “Mobile Villages and Dynamic Landscapes” examines resilience and the handling of crises in a highland community in the Shahrizor plain of the west-central Zagros mountains. In contrast to the highly dynamic alluvial fan of the Varamin Plain, which was the focus of the first phase of the project, the Shahrizor Plain is characterized by a more stable environmental situation and thus offers a suitable comparative case in which to investigate mobilities as strategies of resilience. The site of Tell Begum, occupied from the Late Neolithic to Late Chalcolithic periods (mid-6th to mid-4th mill. BCE), will be the focus of the proposed work. Previous research indicates that despite a superficial appearance of long-term settlement continuity, both longer-term abandonment phases and small-scale settlement shifts characterize the settlement’s history. These suggest different sociocultural responses to crises and ways of averting them. A central element of the investigations will be strategies of economic mobility. We understand economic mobility as patterns of mobility connected to resource acquisition, exchange, and use, involving the circulation of people, plants, animals, materials, and sociocultural information. We postulate that resilience will be greater in cases in which there is higher diversity in the sources of materials, information, and social connections; conversely, low diversity leaves communities more vulnerable in the face of crises. Subsistence resources (plants, animals and their products), durable materials and goods (e.g., pottery, stone tools) as well as communication networks (identifiable as stylistic similarities) will be examined in terms of their degrees of diversity in each phase of the site’s occupation.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Co-Investigator
Professorin Dr. Susan Pollock
