This volume presents the research of the British team within the modern excavations at the northern Mesopotamian site of Chagar Bazar, resumed in 1999 after a 62-year hiatus since the excavations of Max Mallowan. It incorporates settlement archaeology approaches and theoretical ideas of "place" in exploring the site and its internal and external landscapes. The primary focus is the settlement during the early 2nd millennium BC (Old Babylonian Period, post-Samsi-Addu), its final ancient occupation. The authors have taken a contextual approach, integrating aspects of the settlement's internal variations, including both community and private architecture, together with burial practices and symbolic and functional material culture. While its political importance varied, Chagar Bazar's persistence of occupation meant that it played a key role within the regional landscape as a meaningful landmark.

This volume explores early complex society and nascent urbanism, based in studies of Mesopotamia during the fifth-fourth millennia bc. Urbanism in the Near East has traditionally been located in late fourthmillennium bc southern Mesopotamia (south Iraq); but recent excavations and surveys in northeast Syria and southeast Turkey have identified a distinctively northern Mesopotamian variant of this development, which can be dated to the early fourth millennium bc. The authors use multiscalar approaches, including material culturebased studies, settlement archaeology and regional surveys, to achieve an understanding of the dynamics of early urbanism across this key region. The book reveals the variety of social, economic and political relationships that are implicit within an urban centre and an urbanized society.

The excavation of area WF in the eighteenth and nineteenth seasons at Nippur (1988/89, 1990) was aimed specifically at delineating the transition between the Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods, and this goal has been realised. Augusta McMahon took on this task through two seasons, working tirelessly. Stratigraphic exposure of floor after floor of artefacts was slowed drastically by a complex stack of burials that took up almost half of the space in the pit. The pit was taken down until it reached Early Dynastic IIIa, and thus had the material to assess the passage from Early Dynastic to Akkadian in artifactual terms.