Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELAMortuary (Villages to Empire: 4000 Years of Death and Society in Elam (4500-525 BCE))
Reporting period: 2022-01-01 to 2023-12-31
As residue of deliberate ritual depositions, burials are laden with social information, offering a window into how societies wanted to present their dead members and, by extension, themselves. The project Villages to Empire: 4000 Years of Death and Society in Elam (4500-525 BCE) (ELAMortuary), aimed to capitalize on this unique property of the mortuary record by adopting it as a lens to examine social change in the ancient Near East. It targeted the mortuary record of Elam, a culture that began to emerge in today’s southwest Iran from around 4500 BCE and endured into the early years of the Persian Empire (ca. 525 BCE). In particular, it sought to harness the potential of the thousands of burials unearthed at the UNESCO world heritage-listed site of Susa on the Susiana plain during large-scale excavations by the Délégation scientifique française en Perse from the 1890s until World War II.
Geographically, the agriculturally rich low-lying Susiana plain is an extension of the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia—the so-called “Cradle of Civilization”. It was home to a constellation of settlement mounds whose communities participated alongside their Mesopotamian neighbours in many of the fundamental developments in human societies on the path from village societies to the rise of empires. Susa is unquestionably the most remarkable of these mounds, preserving a long, unbroken 4,000-year sequence of occupation from the late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age. For ELAMortuary, it presented a rare and still unexploited opportunity to achieve its aim of mapping social changes through burials over the long durée, and in doing so, generating new knowledge on social responses to instability and change.
The specific research objectives (ROs) to accomplish this aim were: RO1) to create a dataset of burials for analysis; RO2) to identify chronological variation in the data; RO3) to assess the social significance of the variation; RO4) to evaluate the linear “rise of civilization” model against the results of RO3. ELAMortuary’s method succeeded in unlocking social information in burials to begin reconstructing non-linear patterns of social change linked to the complex, ever-changing dynamics between the state, religious institutions, kin groups and individual actors.
Geographically, the agriculturally rich low-lying Susiana plain is an extension of the alluvial plain of southern Mesopotamia—the so-called “Cradle of Civilization”. It was home to a constellation of settlement mounds whose communities participated alongside their Mesopotamian neighbours in many of the fundamental developments in human societies on the path from village societies to the rise of empires. Susa is unquestionably the most remarkable of these mounds, preserving a long, unbroken 4,000-year sequence of occupation from the late Chalcolithic to the Iron Age. For ELAMortuary, it presented a rare and still unexploited opportunity to achieve its aim of mapping social changes through burials over the long durée, and in doing so, generating new knowledge on social responses to instability and change.
The specific research objectives (ROs) to accomplish this aim were: RO1) to create a dataset of burials for analysis; RO2) to identify chronological variation in the data; RO3) to assess the social significance of the variation; RO4) to evaluate the linear “rise of civilization” model against the results of RO3. ELAMortuary’s method succeeded in unlocking social information in burials to begin reconstructing non-linear patterns of social change linked to the complex, ever-changing dynamics between the state, religious institutions, kin groups and individual actors.
ELAMortuary’s work plan was designed so that each RO built on the previous one. RO1 entailed collection of burial data to interrogate in RO2-4. Data sources included archaeological reports, books, and articles, theses, and archives of field notes, short reports, and photographs. Much of the data was extracted from pre-WWII legacy documentation in which many burials were undated or incorrectly dated. Since change over time was central to the project objectives, a critical task was to assign, or reassign, burials to chronological phases relying on any contextual or stratigraphic information, or, most often, datable grave goods. The final dataset of over 3,000 burials was deposited in an open access database with a website front end through which data can be searched and downloaded in csv format to facilitate reuse. To identify chronological variation, RO2 targeted variables such as disposal area, burial type, single/multiple burial, orientation, body arrangement, and grave assemblages. It also examined grave good properties (e.g. typology, function, origin, economic and social value), spatial arrangements, placement of materials in physical relationships with each other and with the body to create meaning, and construction of identities and ideal social relations. Epigraphic references to mortuary practices also contributed evidence from ca. 1800 BCE onward.
RO3 examined the social significance of the chronological changes and RO4 measured the findings against the “rise of civilization” model. RO3-4 results deemed most fruitful for publication were on the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2900-2000 BCE) to Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1600 BCE) transition, which brought social instability and change across the Near East. Over 250 never-before-studied clay coffin burials dating to this transition, were published as a monograph: Elite Mortuary Culture at Susa: An analysis of early Middle Bronze Age clay coffin burials (2024, Harrassowitz). It attributes changes in mortuary practices at Susa, namely, a new clay coffin burial type and an unprecedented consumption of wealth in graves, to a complex blend of factors including cultural ties to Mesopotamia, new political and economic conditions, increased opportunities for private wealth accumulation, and intensified global connectivity. A larger subset of burials dating to ca. 2400-1700 BCE was published in “Production and Mortuary Consumption of Copper-Base Materials at Susa in the Early to Middle Bronze Age Transition” (Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 3: 1-38), which illuminates an increase in deployment of copper-base products at Susa to give structure to an increasingly stratified society. A second article, “The Tomb of Two Priestesses?” (appendix of inscriptions by host supervisor G.P. Basello, Asia Anteriore Antica, under review), examined construction of royal-religious elite identities in the turbulent years leading up to the Persian empire.
Other exploitation and dissemination activities included seminars, conference papers and workshops. Amongst the most significant were a conference paper “From Elam to Persia: Continuity (and Change) in the Mortuary Record” in Transmission and Transformation in the Elamite and Achaemenid Cultures (1/12/2023, Unibo/ISMEO), and an ELAMortuary workshop Old Data-New Insights: Reframing the value of legacy materials from French excavations at Susa (8/11/2023, University of Naples, “L’Orientale”). This online-in person hybrid workshop with the invited participation of the Louvre Museum (France) and the Susa Museum (Iran) served as an occasion to both launch the project database and discuss the potential for using legacy data from Susa.
RO3 examined the social significance of the chronological changes and RO4 measured the findings against the “rise of civilization” model. RO3-4 results deemed most fruitful for publication were on the Early Bronze Age (ca. 2900-2000 BCE) to Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000-1600 BCE) transition, which brought social instability and change across the Near East. Over 250 never-before-studied clay coffin burials dating to this transition, were published as a monograph: Elite Mortuary Culture at Susa: An analysis of early Middle Bronze Age clay coffin burials (2024, Harrassowitz). It attributes changes in mortuary practices at Susa, namely, a new clay coffin burial type and an unprecedented consumption of wealth in graves, to a complex blend of factors including cultural ties to Mesopotamia, new political and economic conditions, increased opportunities for private wealth accumulation, and intensified global connectivity. A larger subset of burials dating to ca. 2400-1700 BCE was published in “Production and Mortuary Consumption of Copper-Base Materials at Susa in the Early to Middle Bronze Age Transition” (Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia 3: 1-38), which illuminates an increase in deployment of copper-base products at Susa to give structure to an increasingly stratified society. A second article, “The Tomb of Two Priestesses?” (appendix of inscriptions by host supervisor G.P. Basello, Asia Anteriore Antica, under review), examined construction of royal-religious elite identities in the turbulent years leading up to the Persian empire.
Other exploitation and dissemination activities included seminars, conference papers and workshops. Amongst the most significant were a conference paper “From Elam to Persia: Continuity (and Change) in the Mortuary Record” in Transmission and Transformation in the Elamite and Achaemenid Cultures (1/12/2023, Unibo/ISMEO), and an ELAMortuary workshop Old Data-New Insights: Reframing the value of legacy materials from French excavations at Susa (8/11/2023, University of Naples, “L’Orientale”). This online-in person hybrid workshop with the invited participation of the Louvre Museum (France) and the Susa Museum (Iran) served as an occasion to both launch the project database and discuss the potential for using legacy data from Susa.
ELAMortuary advanced the state of the art on social dynamics in the transition from the Early to Middle Bronze Ages when instability and change swept across the Near East. It also delivered a large dataset of burials for reuse by the scientific community as comparative data for research on other regions, or as additional data to incorporate into “big data”-style studies of mortuary practices. ELAMortuary also made an important scientific contribution with its innovation activities in the development, testing, and redevelopment of methods to utilize difficult legacy documentation and archaeological material from a major ancient Near Eastern site (as described in the project monograph).
The tangible impact of this on society is the salvaging of valuable information on past human societies and culture from a UNESCO world heritage site. On a wider magnitude, ELAMortuary’s approaches might serve as a model for other projects to deploy legacy materials languishing in archives and storerooms around the world. This would aid recovery of even more information lost during excavations in the Middle East by colonial European powers prior to the development of modern archaeological methods. The less tangible but equally important social impact of ELAMortuary lies in its delivery of new knowledge on social behavior at key points in history that altered human social trajectories such as the emergence of “complex” societies, urbanization, institutionalized religion, states, and empires.
The tangible impact of this on society is the salvaging of valuable information on past human societies and culture from a UNESCO world heritage site. On a wider magnitude, ELAMortuary’s approaches might serve as a model for other projects to deploy legacy materials languishing in archives and storerooms around the world. This would aid recovery of even more information lost during excavations in the Middle East by colonial European powers prior to the development of modern archaeological methods. The less tangible but equally important social impact of ELAMortuary lies in its delivery of new knowledge on social behavior at key points in history that altered human social trajectories such as the emergence of “complex” societies, urbanization, institutionalized religion, states, and empires.