Violence & Imagination After the Collapse

In the late fourth millennium BCE, the villages, temples, and palace of the Upper Euphrates region stood between two social traditions: the comparatively hierarchical, centrally organized Mesopotamian social world to the south and the comparatively egalitarian, decentralized Kura-Araxes social sphere to the north. Over the next seven centuries, this positioning and the interactions it sparked fed into a wide variety of reactions among the region's inhabitants, ranging from cataclysmic violence to a flowering of innovation in visual culture and social arrangements. These events had a wide array of short-term and long-term impacts, some limited to a single house or settlement, and some, like the innovation of the Warrior Tomb template, that transformed societies across West Asia. With an eye towards detail, a theoretical approach emphasizing motivation, and multiple scales of analysis, this book organizes previously unpublished data from six sites in the region, Arslantepe, Ta?kun Mevkii, Pulur, Nor?untepe, Tepecik, and Korucutepe, dating to this dramatic and transformative period.