Short, clear chapters each focus on a single topic, presenting necessary information thoroughly and clearly, in a manner that's easy for students to grasp Large number of musical examples allows students to better understand techniques by seeing them in multiple contexts Companion website provides video demonstrations that help students understand techniques in action

Short, clear chapters each focus on a single topic, presenting necessary information thoroughly and clearly, in a manner that's easy for students to grasp Large number of musical examples allows students to better understand techniques by seeing them in multiple contexts Companion website provides video demonstrations that help students understand techniques in action

The Eastern Fertile Crescent region of western Iran and eastern Iraq hosted major developments in the transition from hunter-forager to farmer-herder lifestyles through the Early Neolithic period, 10,000-7000 BC. Within the scope of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project, excavations have been conducted since 2012 at two Early Neolithic sites in the Kurdistan region of Iraq: Bestansur and Shimshara. Bestansur represents an early stage in the transition to sedentary, farming life, where the inhabitants pursued a mixed strategy of hunting, foraging, herding and cultivating, maximising the new opportunities afforded by the warmer, wetter climate of the Early Holocene. They also constructed substantial buildings of mudbrick, including a major building with a minimum of 65 human individuals, mainly infants, buried under its floor in association with hundreds of beads. These human remains provide new insights into mortuary practices, demography, diet and disease during the early stages of sedentarisation. The material culture of Bestansur and Shimshara is rich in imported items such as obsidian, carnelian and sea-shells, indicating the extent to which Early Neolithic communities were networked across the Eastern Fertile Crescent and beyond. This volume includes final reports by a large-scale interdisciplinary team on all aspects of the results from excavations at Bestansur and Shimshara, through application of state-of-the-art scientific techniques, methods and analyses. The net result is to re-emphasise the enormous significance of the Eastern Fertile Crescent in one of the most important episodes in human history: the Neolithic transition.

Over a period of several millennia, from the Late Pleistocene to the Early Holocene (c. 13,000-7000 BC), communities in south-west Asia developed from hunter-foragers to villager-farmers, bringing fundamental changes in all aspects of life. These Neolithic developments took place over vast chronological and geographical scales, with considerable regional variability in specific trajectories of change. Two vital and consistent aspects of change were a shift from mobile to sedentary lifestyles and increasingly intensive human management of animal and plant resources, leading to full domestication of particular species. Building on earlier campaigns of archaeological investigation, the current phase of the Central Zagros Archaeological Project is designed to explore these issues in one key region, the Zagros zone including central west Iran. Two Early Neolithic mounds were excavated: Sheikh-e Abad in the high Zagros and Jani, in the foothills of the Mesopotamian plains, each comprising up to 10 m depth of deposits indicating occupation spanning over 2000 years, and providing great scope for diachronic and spatial analyses. These two sites make major contributions to knowledge regarding the origins of sedentism and increasing resource management in Southwest Asia, and associated developments in social, cultural and ritual practices in this formative region of human cultural development.

Tell Brak in Syria is one of the largest and most important multi-period sites in northern Mesopotamia. Excavations in 1994-1996 cast new light on everyday life at the settlement through several phases of occupation from the early 4th millennium BC to the 2nd millennium BC. Volume 4 in the Tell Brak Monograph series provides an account of the architecture, artefacts, and environmental evidence, supported by a program of radiocarbon dating. The results emphasize the indigenous nature of cultural development in Upper Mesopotamia during these millennia. Among the highlights are a small temple dating to the Ninevite 5 period (earlier 3rd millennium BC), which provides new insights into a phenomenon that has hitherto been little explored; and an exceptional hoard of precious materials and artefacts that underlines the importance of Tell Brak in the later 3rd millennium BC. The report is completed by studies of subsistence, diet, economy, use of space, and craft activities, which focus on the variabilities and continuities in daily life that underlay the shifting political and cultural forces. These studies highlight the unique position of Tell Brak in the long-term ebb and flow of regional interactions across Mesopotamia.

This fifth volume of Abu Salabikh Excavations is the definitive account of the excavation of two large domestic residences at the Early Dynastic III city at Abu Salabikh, in south Iraq 15 km to the north of Nippur. It describes and illustrates the houses and their contents, in particular the intramural burials, with coverage of the human osteology, and botanical, zoological and micromorphological studies.