Agency and Identity in the Ancient Near East: New Paths Forward

Concepts of agency and identity have penetrated very little into practices and research agendas in Near Eastern archaeology. This volume addresses this lack, and initiates a new level of theoretical discourse in the field. Several themes run throughout the chapters in the volume, including: how agency theory can be employed in reconstructing the meaning of spaces and material culture; how agency and identity intersect and how archaeologists might investigate this intersection; how the availability of a textual corpus may impact the agency approach. An overarching goal of this volume is to advance the theoretical discourse within archaeology, and particularly among practitioners of archaeology in the Near East. The volume is interdisciplinary, including contributions derived from the fields of philology, art history, computer simulation studies, materials science, and the archaeology of settlement, architecture, and empire. It offers chapters ranging in time from the Neolithic to the Islamic period, and covers cultures and sites located in the present-day regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel.

Sharon R. Steadman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at SUNY Cortland and Director of the Brooks Museum at the college. She is the author of numerous articles on ceramics, architecture, and interregional interaction analysis studies in Anatolia, including The Archaeology of Religion, (2008). She is the Field Director of the adir Hyk excavations on the north central Anatolian plateau, and has worked in Turkey since 1989 and in the Middle East since 1983. Jennifer C. Ross is an Associate Professor of Art and Archaeology at Hood College. She is an Assistant Director of the adir Hyk excavations in Turkey and has published articles on topics ranging from ideology and representation in Mesopotamia to metallurgical technologies in the Near East. Her current research is von the intersection of technology with social transformation at the dawn of urbanism in Mesopotamia.