Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond Culture and History of the Ancient Near East Founding Editor M.H.E. Weippert Editor-in-Chief homas Schneider Editors Eckart Frahm W. Randall Garr B. Halpern heo P.J. van den Hout Irene J. Winter VOLUME 50 Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond Edited by Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling and Laura B. Mazow LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011 his book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Household archaeology in Ancient Israel and beyond / edited by Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling, and Laura B. Mazow. p. cm. — (Culture and history of the ancient Near East, ISSN 1566-2055 ; v. 50) Papers from a session at the Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research held in Boston, Mass, Nov. 2008. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20625-0 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. Bronze age—Israel—Congresses. 2. Iron age—Israel—Congresses. 3. Israel—Antiquities—Congresses. 4. Social archaeology—Israel—Congresses. 5. Households—Israel—History—To 1500— Congresses. 6. Material culture—Israel—History—To 1500—Congresses. 7. Excavations (Archaelogy)—Israel—Congresses. I. Yasur-Landau, Assaf. II. Ebeling, Jennie R. III. Mazow, Laura B. IV. American Schools of Oriental Research. Meeting (2008 : Boston, Mass.) V. Title. VI. Series. GN778.32.I75H68 2011 933—dc22 2011006136 ISSN 1566-2055 ISBN 978 90 04 20625 0 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, he Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to he Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................ vii Introduction: he Past and Present of Household Archaeology in Israel .................................................................... Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling and Laura B. Mazow 1 Understanding Houses, Households, and the Levantine Archaeological Record .................................................................. James W. Hardin 9 Household Archaeology in Israel: Looking into the Microscopic Record ...................................................................... Ruth Shahack-Gross 27 Applying On-Site Analysis of Faunal Assemblages from Domestic Contexts: A Case Study from the Lower City of Hazor .......................................................................................... Nimrod Marom and Sharon Zuckerman “he Kingdom Is His Brick Mould and the Dynasty Is His Wall”: he Impact of Urbanization on Middle Bronze Age Households in the Southern Levant ........................................... Assaf Yasur-Landau 37 55 A Tale of Two Houses: he Role of Pottery in Reconstructing Household Wealth and Composition ........................................ Nava Panitz-Cohen 85 Differentiating between Public and Residential Buildings: A Case Study from Late Bronze Age II Tell esˢ-Sˢai/Gath ...... Itzhaq Shai, Aren M. Maeir, Yuval Gadot and Joe Uziel 107 Household Gleanings from Iron I Tel Dan .................................. David Ilan 133 vi contents Houses and Households in Settlements along the Yarkon River, Israel, during the Iron Age I: Society, Economy, and Identity ................................................................. Yuval Gadot Early Iron Age Domestic Material Culture in Philistia and an Eastern Mediterranean Koiné ...................................................... David Ben-Shlomo Household Archaeology in LHIIIC Tiryns ................................... Philipp Stockhammer he Archaeology of the Extended Family: A Household Compound from Iron II Tell en-Nasˢbeh .................................. Aaron J. Brody 155 183 207 237 Household Economies in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah .... Avraham Faust 255 Household Activities at Tel Beersheba .......................................... Lily Singer-Avitz 275 he Empire in the House, the House in the Empire: Toward a Household Archaeology Perspective on the Assyrian Empire in the Levant ................................................... Virginia Rimmer Herrmann 303 Cult Corners in the Aegean and the Levant ................................. Louise A. Hitchcock 321 Varieties of Religious Expression in the Domestic Setting ........ Beth Alpert Nakhai 347 A Problem of Deinition: “Cultic” and “Domestic” Contexts in Philistia ............................................................................................ Michael D. Press 361 References ........................................................................................... 391 Index .................................................................................................... 447 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the participants in the roundtable session “Household Archaeology in Ancient Israel and Beyond” held at the November 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Boston, Massachusetts, from which this volume stemmed, as well as the individual contributors to this volume. heir enthusiasm about the theme of household archaeology and diligent commitment to the success of this project enabled it to come to fruition. Inbal Samet copy edited the manuscript before it was sent to Brill and Sivan Kedar assisted in unifying the bibliography for the volume. Lauren Weingart of the University of Evansville assisted in compiling the index. We are grateful for their ine work. Funds toward the publication of the manuscript were provided by the homas Harriot College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University, and the research authority, University of Haifa. We warmly acknowledge the editorial support of the Cultures and History of the Ancient Near East series, Brill, and especially Baruch Halpern during the production of this volume. Many good ideas for improvement were suggested by an anonymous reviewer. We, of course, are responsible for all remaining mistakes and inaccuracies. Editing this volume has been an exciting experience for us, and its production process was made fast, simple, and a very positive experience by the expertise of the Brill staf, including Jennifer Pavelko and Katelyn Chin. During the two-and-a-half-year process of working on this volume our families grew with the addition of four children! We would like to thank our spouses and children for their patience and support during this period. AY-L, JRE and LBM INTRODUCTION: THE PAST AND PRESENT OF HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY IN ISRAEL Assaf Yasur-Landau, Jennie R. Ebeling and Laura B. Mazow Households are the “most common social component of subsistence, the smallest and most abundant activity group” (Wilk and Rathje 1982: 618). he household, along with its archaeological manifestation in domestic assemblages, merits research in its own right not only because it is the social group best represented in the archaeological record, but also because its practices within the domestic sphere directly relate to the economy, political organization, and social structure (Tringham 1991: 101). he domestic arena, inseparable from family and kinship, is where socialization starts. Here, by participating in behavioral patterns and observing the behavior of others, one acquires some of the most important elements of one’s identity, among them kinship and language (Bourdieu 1990). Despite the impressive number of well-excavated domestic contexts in Bronze and Iron Age levels at sites in Israel, studies relating to household behavioral patterns, kinship groups, and manifestations of status and gender within the house were uncommon in the archaeology of the 1980s and early 1990s (with the notable exceptions of Stager 1985a; Geva 1989; Daviau 1993; and Singer-Avitz 1996). Several articles that are mostly descriptive catalogues appeared during this time in edited volumes (e.g., Kempinski and Reich 1992). A signiicant departure from this is Holladay’s entry “House, Israelite” in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, which used ethnoarchaeological data to investigate demographics, activity areas, and socioeconomic aspects of Iron II houses (1992). In the present volume, Hardin takes up the task of reviewing the history of household archaeology in the southern Levant in the 1980s and 1990s. For the most part, the power of the text in “biblical archaeology” dictated an extremely narrow set of research questions. he study of household assemblages was one-dimensional and selective in scope, ignoring aspects of gender, household production, and status in the houses of the early Israelites and Philistines. Researchers instead asked “macro” questions relating to group identity and ethnicity 2 assaf yasur-landau, jennie r. ebeling and laura b. mazow (Yasur-Landau 2010). he most notable cases are the numerous studies devoted to the so-called four-room house and its role as an ethnic marker of ancient Israelites (e.g., Shiloh 1970; Fritz 1977; Herzog 1984; see Bunimovitz and Faust 2003a for further references) and the debate over the interpretation of the absence of pig remains from Iron I Israelite settlements as an indicator of an early taboo against pork consumption (e.g., Dever 1995; Finkelstein 1996; Hesse and Wapnish 1997). Additionally, several studies published in the 1990s used material culture remains from domestic contexts to demonstrate distinct ethnic boundaries between Israelites and Philistines and between Canaanites and Philistines in the formative period of the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Bunimovitz and Yasur-Landau 1996; Finkelstein 1996, 1997; Killebrew 1998). From the mid 1990s to more recently, new areas have been investigated in the archaeology of the Philistines that have gone beyond a simple focus on ethnicity and into the realm of household archaeology; these include technological aspects of pottery production (e.g., Killebrew 1996, 1998; Ben-Shlomo 2006a), ancient foodways (e.g., Ben-Shlomo et al. 2008), and the study of aspects of gender in the Philistine migration (e.g., Yasur-Landau 1999; Bunimovitz and YasurLandau 2002). he meticulous recording system of inds at Tel MiqneEkron has enabled Mazow (2005) to conduct the irst full quantitative spatial analysis of multiple household assemblages in Philistia. here is no doubt that the similarly detailed record of excavations at Ashkelon (Stager et al. 2008) will inspire similar studies. At the same time, however, study of the early Israelites through household remains continued to be characterized by a strong component of ethnic studies (Killebrew 2005; Faust 2006), while it also developed new approaches to the archaeology of the family, including ideological aspects of the four-room house (Bunimovitz and Faust 2003a), gender and household production (Meyers 2003a), household cult (Ackerman 2003), and even narrative reconstructions of life among the Iron I highland peasants (van der Toorn 2003; Ebeling 2010). he renewed interest in household archaeology in recent years has yielded a growing corpus of articles dealing with a wide range of topics, from spatial analyses of activity areas to family structure and kinship ideology (e.g., Faust 1999a, 2001; Schloen 2001; Bunimovitz and Faust 2003a; Ebeling and Rowan 2004; Hardin 2004; and Gadot and Yasur-Landau 2006, to name a few). In addition, a volume of Near Eastern Archaeology (Herr 2003) was devoted to the theme “House introduction 3 and Home in the Southern Levant,” presenting ive papers centering on houses from the Neolithic through the Byzantine period. One can note, however, the continued focus on the four-room house (see above) with two articles devoted to that subject (e.g., Faust and Bunimovitz 2003b; Clark 2003). Despite the growing contributions to this developing ield, however, recent general publications on the archaeology of the Levant (e.g., Richard 2003) have not included articles on houses or household archaeology, revealing the lack of integration of these topics into larger accessible treatments. To date, there has not been a single conference dedicated to household archaeology in Israel and not a single edited volume has appeared. he present volume, which grew out of a successful round-table session on household archaeology in the Bronze and Iron Age Levant, held at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research in Boston, Massachusetts, is therefore the irst volume to be published on household archaeology in this region. he majority of the seventeen papers included in this volume relect innovative points of view on various aspects of theory and praxis of household archaeology during the Bronze and Iron Ages (ca. 3000–586 bce) in the Levant and surrounding regions (Anatolia and the Aegean). Many of the papers show the great advantage of taking a holistic approach to the study of household assemblages. Combining the study of architecture with a spatial and functional analysis of artifacts and ecofacts oten results in a more comprehensive reconstruction of the activities carried out in each domestic unit. At the same time, the studies included in this volume frequently employ explicit archaeological methodologies for the analysis of household remains that are inspired by theoretical advances in world archaeology. he next step in household archaeology research in Israel is presented here, with the use of tailor-made data collection strategies designed to answer questions posed by household archaeology. Along with these innovations come challenges that are apparent in the papers in this volume. he complexity of site formation processes, for example, is not adequately addressed by some authors. In addition, some authors shy away from using ethnicity or do so rather simplistically. Sometimes the data themselves make analyses a challenge, as in cases where researchers have admirably attempted to reanalyze material excavated long ago. Challenges related to artifact collection and curation simply do not permit the types of statistical analyses that are possible using material from recent excavation projects. 4 assaf yasur-landau, jennie r. ebeling and laura b. mazow he irst section of this book includes three papers that use very diferent research methodologies. Hardin’s paper places the study of household archaeology in the Levant within the very rich theoretical background of household archaeology practiced in world archaeology. He reviews the development of household archaeology in the New World and in the Levant before turning to the archaeological and other evidence available in the southern Levant—including texts and ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and ethnoarchaeological data—to identify households and reconstruct past domestic behavior. Hardin examines the important contribution of Schloen (2001), which highlights the various data sources available for household research in the Levant, as a case study. He concludes his review on a positive note, suggesting that household archaeology is beginning to impact the archaeology of the Levant in much the same way that it impacted New World archaeology in recent decades. While household archaeology studies can be conducted on any excavation data, an emerging trend in the archaeology of the Southern Levant is to excavate areas with speciic questions in mind relating to household activities and using multidisciplinary approaches for data retrieval. Marom and Zuckerman’s work at Tel Hazor is an example of such a project. In their paper, the authors describe the tailor-made recovery procedure for zooarchaeological remains created for the study of Area S, a domestic area within the lower city. In a climate of “biblical archaeology,” in which archaeological theory, if used at all, was most oten applied in hindsight, we cannot overestimate the importance of this efort to present an explicit methodological framework for the retrieval of data relevant to the study of Bronze Age households. he advantages of multidisciplinary methodologies are clearly demonstrated in the paper by Shahack-Gross, who stresses the importance of geoarchaeological, and especially micromorphological, approaches to studying archaeological contexts. he case study of the Iron I monumental building from Tel Dor is an important cautionary tale, warning against an intuitive interpretation of archaeological deposits. Deposits irst interpreted as loors were reanalyzed using micromorphological analyses and determined to be accumulations of dung on top of the actual loor. A second case study complements the work of Gadot and Yasur-Landau (2006) on the burned late Iron I house at Tel Megiddo, a complex excavated with the clear intention of reconstructing the introduction 5 lives of household groups. Shahack-Gross’s work also exposes intriguing details on trash disposal practices at the site that have added to the understanding of activities practiced outside the house itself. he second section of the book includes case studies in household archaeology in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages and in the Iron Age. Interest in Israelite and Philistine ethnicity, with its current focus on the study of Iron I domestic contexts, has let Canaanite households of the Middle and Late Bronze Ages largely ignored in recent research. hree articles in this volume demonstrate how little we know about the Canaanites and, at the same time, the great potential of household archaeology to address fundamental questions about Canaanite society, including status diferentiation, gender relations, and intragroup tensions. Yasur-Landau’s work touches on the tense interactions between domestic groups and the emerging rulership at the dawn of urbanization in the MB I, and the conlicts that resulted when areas in which houses once stood were built over with fortiication walls and palaces. At Tel Dan such conlicts may have led to political instability, while at Tel Megiddo household groups resisted the restrictions imposed by the construction of fortiications for generations. In the late MBI and early MBII, several mechanisms were implemented for minimizing conlicts; the most important among them was the massive enlargement of the areas of sites to allow natural growth of domestic areas as well as sufficient space for monumental structures. Panitz-Cohen’s paper clearly demonstrates the great value of wellexcavated contexts for the reconstruction of past behavioral patterns. Her meticulous analysis of the pottery from two household assemblages at Tel Batash ofers important insights on questions of household wealth, status, and composition during the era of Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty control over Canaan. he contribution of Shai, Maeir, Gadot, and Uziel deals with the important theme of identifying the purpose of architectural units, and speciically diferentiating between private and public architecture using a LBII structure from Tell es-Sˢai/Gath as a case study. Such differentiation is more easily made in the case of either a humble domestic structure or a palatial building, but is harder in less easily deined cases, such as the “patrician houses” in Levantine archaeology. he presentation of a systematic, multivariable analysis of this structure and its contents provides a very useful tool for the study of such structures in the future. 6 assaf yasur-landau, jennie r. ebeling and laura b. mazow he study of ancient Israelite and Philistine ethnicity, as noted above, has led to the investigation of questions of domestic behavioral patterns. Four papers in this volume show the further development of this trend, relecting a focus on domestic activities not only as ethnic markers but as a means of understanding past societies. hus, Ilan’s chapter goes beyond the popular interest in identifying archaeological evidence for the settlement of the tribe of Dan as described in Judges 18. Instead, Ilan carefully examines the architecture, tools, vessels, and zooarchaeological inds to reconstruct an intriguing process of transformation from corporate group village organization to a town fabric dominated by nuclear families. he search for an explicit household methodology is evident also in Gadot’s work on Iron I houses along the Yarkon River in four diferent twelth–eleventh century bce communities: Aphek, ʚIzbet Sˢartah, Tell Qasile, and Tel Gerisa. His list of variables developed for comparing houses and their location within sites enables a richer understanding of settlement patterns in this region during the Iron I. he results go far beyond demarcating ethnicity and reveal a marked variability in rural settlement structures within the same small region in the form of a village, a compound community, a town community, and a farmstead. While koiné is a term commonly associated with the spread of artistic styles and related elite behavioral patterns, Ben-Shlomo’s study argues for the existence of an eastern Mediterranean koiné of twelthcentury-bce Aegean domestic behavioral patterns. He argues that similar behavioral patterns seen in domestic activities, such as cooking and serving food, and textile manufacture, and in cultic paraphernalia, relect shared conceptions of house and household that were created through multilateral transmissions (both east and west) of peoples (immigrants) and ideas. A complementary picture of Aegean households on the Greek mainland in the twelth century is presented by Stockhammer, who explores the change in feasting activities between the Palatial and Post-Palatial periods in the town of Tiryns. he feast in the Post-Palatial period is characterized as an event in which the memory of the Palatial past is narrated and manipulated, and an ethos of international contacts with other parts of the Aegean is presented. Four papers focus on Iron II houses in the Kingdoms of Judah, Israel, Samʙal, and Gath. However, in contrast to past tendencies in biblical archaeology, in these papers the house is presented as much introduction 7 more than a mere locus in which ancient Israelite identity resided and the biblical habitus was created and maintained. Faust presents a compelling case for patterns of household economy in the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In the rural areas, extended families were the common economic unit, and the lineage economy mediated between the households and the royal economy. he situation in the towns was more complex: most families functioned as nuclear families, directly interacting with the royal economy, while the rich and upper classes were able to maintain their extended family networks. he great value found in the reinterpretation of existing excavation data is shown in Brody’s meticulous spatial analysis of pottery and other inds from the Iron II houses at Tell en-Nasˢbeh, biblical Mizpah. Brody’s conclusion difers from Faust’s by arguing for the important role of extended families and urban household compounds shared by several nuclear families in this Iron II city. Singer-Avitz’s article is the irst English-language presentation of the author’s important work at Beersheba, which was one of the irst studies to implement a spatial analysis of an Iron II domestic context. In contrast to the situation of organic growth at Tell en-Nasˢbeh, Beersheba was a planned site. he predominant architecture of three- and four-room houses, without compounds or clusters of buildings, suggests that most units on the site were occupied by nuclear families. However, two structures located by the city gate (Buildings 1228 and 1229), which did not contain ovens, grinding stones or loom weights, are interpreted as nondomestic units, perhaps guest houses or spaces for official use. he later part of the Iron Age was an era in which political pressure, taxation, and conquest by the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires had a profound impact on all strata of society in the Levant. Herrmann puts forward an implicit methodological framework aimed at understanding the impact of empires on daily life through a study of continuity and change in the domestic economies and social organization of domestic structures in an Assyrian imperial province, using a case study of the Zincirli, ancient Samʙal, households. he third part of this volume deals with the identiication of household cult and its role as an important domestic activity. Israelite household cult is discussed by Nakhai in an article that exposes the important role of domestic cult practices in two separate realms. In the irst, subsistence and the domestic economy were attended to at 8 assaf yasur-landau, jennie r. ebeling and laura b. mazow the household shrine, which was located in the home of the familial elders within the multiroom residential compound. In the second, Nakhai discusses the importance of women’s cult practices, which were primarily concerned with matters relating to reproduction. hese rituals were conducted in almost every home using special religious ephemera, and not limited to the shrines. he role of the cult within Philistine households is examined by Press, who puts forward various methodological difficulties in identifying household cults and diferentiating between popular and official cultic practices. His two case studies—Tel Miqne-Ekron Room 16, which was interpreted by the excavators as a cultic room, and Ashdod Room 5032, which was interpreted as a domestic space even though it yielded a major cultic ind (a complete “Ashdoda” igurine)—show the interconnectedness between the domestic and the cultic, the official and the private. he positivistic methodological approach presented in this paper is innovative not only in its refusal to ofer a deinite solution, but also in its articulation of the basic questions and deinitions. It thus creates a solid foundation for future contextual study of igurines and other cultic objects in Philistia. Hitchcock exposes lines of similarity and aspects of diference between household cultic practices in the Aegean, Cyprus, and the Levant in her study on the form and function of cult corners. According to the author, the use of the term “cult corners,” which derives from the archaeology of the Levant, is also useful for the study of nondomestic cults in the Aegean and may facilitate further comparative studies of religious practices in the Aegean and the Levant. We hope that the diverse collection of papers in this volume provides much food for thought and inspires archaeologists working in the southern Levant and beyond to develop research projects in the area of household archaeology. THE EMPIRE IN THE HOUSE, THE HOUSE IN THE EMPIRE: TOWARD A HOUSEHOLD ARCHAEOLOGY PERSPECTIVE ON THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE IN THE LEVANT Virginia Rimmer Herrmann he expansion of the Neo-Assyrian Empire throughout a large part of the Near Eastern world in the ninth to seventh centuries bce is widely considered to have been a transformative epoch in the history of the region, profoundly altering its political and cultural landscape and ushering in an “Age of Empires.” he contrasting images of the pax Assyriaca, providing stability and enabling exchange, and of the destructions, deaths, and deportations vividly portrayed in Assyrian royal inscriptions and in the Hebrew Bible both contribute to this picture of sweeping change. In the past few decades, studies of regional settlement patterns in imperial provinces have succeeded in documenting the major demographic shits brought about by the Assyrian Empire, and the excavation of Assyrian period sites throughout the region has increased dramatically. From the extant archaeological evidence, however, one would still be hard pressed to answer the question of whether and in what ways incorporation into the Assyrian Empire was transformative on the level of provincial subjects’ daily social and economic lives, and whether such transformations were imposed from above or emerged from below, despite the fact that this is a crucial element of the prevailing macromodels of imperial rule. Progress toward the resolution of this question will require the contextual and chronological detail ofered by household archaeology, as has been demonstrated by several investigations of New World empires. his paper thus advocates a new emphasis on the careful investigation and analysis of ordinary domestic structures in Assyrian imperial provinces, aiming to identify changes and continuities in the domestic economies and social organization of its subjects. Such a program of household archaeology is planned for the new excavations of the University of Chicago at Samʙal (Zincirli Höyük), the capital of a small Syro-Hittite Kingdom that became an Assyrian province in the late eighth century bce. 304 virginia rimmer herrmann The Nature of Assyrian Rule One of the major issues in the study of ancient empires has long been the question of the fundamental motivation for their expansion into and consolidation of new territories. he “basic philosophical diferences” regarding this topic identiied by Robert McC. Adams at a late 1907s symposium on ancient empires (1979: 400) still persist today. On the one hand, there is a basically materialist viewpoint, according to which the motivation of resource acquisition underlies all imperial ideology and action, and imperialism is but one mechanism of interregional economic exploitation. his perspective has been articulated frequently as the core/center-periphery or world-systems model (derived from Wallerstein 1974), which predicts simultaneous economic development of the core polity and underdevelopment of peripheral areas (e.g., Ekholm and Friedman 1979; Smith 1995). On the other side, are those who grant imperial ideology and social structure primacy over the principle of economic maximization in determining ancient imperial activities, and see economic transfers as means to political ends, rather than ends in themselves (e.g., Kemp 1978, 1997; Finley 1978; Eisenstadt 1979; Schloen 2001). his viewpoint is skeptical of the notion of a systematic, long-term drain of wealth from the periphery to the imperial center and points to the oten hety debit side of the “imperial balance sheet” as evidence for economically “irrational” behavior. he most systematic expression of this more Weberian approach that emphasizes the culturally mediated motivations of diferent types of social actors is, perhaps, the “patrimonial/bureaucratic” imperial typology of the sociologist Eisenstadt (1979).1 Recently, core-periphery and world-systems models have also been criticized from a post-colonial perspective for their centrist bias, whereby all change is initiated by the empire and “all power and control emanat[e] from the imperial core,” denying imperial subjects any agency to shape events (Sinopoli 2001: 465; cf. Webster 1996; Alcock 1997; Schreiber 2006). 1 Eisenstadt makes a fundamental distinction between “patrimonial kingdoms,” which had “few symbolic and institutional diferences between the center and periphery,” and “Imperial” bureaucratic regimes, such as China or Byzantium, which were characterized by “a high level of distinctiveness of the center” and a self-conscious “Great Tradition” (1979: 22–25). the empire in the house, the house in the empire 305 Along these lines, a few studies of the Neo-Assyrian Empire have countered the notion of systematic economic “policies” toward imperial territories that is oten implied by proponents of the core-periphery perspective, citing the inconsistency of Assyrian treatment of the economic base of diferent regions, and arguing that strategic and military concerns provide a better explanation for this (Na’aman 2003; Master 2003). In this view, increases in trade and market activity are better understood as responses to the new political stability and the opening of new markets than to deliberate Assyrian eforts (Mazzoni 2000; Na’aman 2003; Master 2003). Another perspective cites the “consensus to empire” of many individuals and groups across the Assyrian realm (Lanfranchi 1997) and focuses on the socially integrative elements (in particular, an imperial elite identity, the Aramaic language, and the imperial army) that held the empire together and transformed its society (Lumsden 2001). In this view, new divisions were created among people in the Assyrian Empire, but these were not between center and periphery. hese exceptions notwithstanding, the core-periphery viewpoint has become almost the conventional wisdom in the literature on the Neo-Assyrian Empire. he majority of scholars of the past few decades attribute the expansion of the empire to a desire to control natural resources and trade routes (e.g., Jankowska 1969; Oded 1974; Larsen 1979; Winter 1983; Grayson 1995). Gitin (1997) and Allen (1997), who espouse world-systems theory, and Parker (2001), who invokes the territorial-hegemonic model of empire,2 argue that their survey and excavations at the periphery of the empire show that Assyrian imperial authorities selectively transformed their territories so as to extract the maximum revenues from them, and their work and conclusions are widely cited by historians (e.g., Halpern 1991; Fales 2001; Finkelstein and Silberman 2001; van de Mieroop 2003; Parpola 2003). In regions where Assyrian control was indirect (client kingdoms), the pressure to supply tribute to the Assyrian king is oten credited with spurring widespread economic rationalizations, including the adoption of a 2 he territorial-hegemonic model was developed originally by Luttwak for the Roman Empire (1976), but later developed and modiied by Hassig (1985) and D’Altroy (1992) for the Aztec and Inca Empires, respectively. In the territorial-hegemonic model, the intensity of imperial control in diferent parts of an empire varies along a continuum from complete territorial control and annexation to political hegemony and inluence, according to an imperial calculation of the economic and strategic beneits to be derived versus the costs of increased control (D’Altroy 1992: 19–20). 306 virginia rimmer herrmann market economy (Frankenstein 1979; Olivier 1994; Byrne 2003; Routledge 2004). his trend in the study of the Assyrian Empire has had the salutary efect of diverting attention away from the palaces and temples of the imperial capitals and toward social and economic questions and the study of the imperial periphery, but its conclusions deserve further interrogation. hirty years ago, Adams issued a challenge to archaeologists to attempt to test the claim by advocates of the core-periphery model of simultaneous economic development of the imperial center and underdevelopment of the periphery for the Assyrian Empire in particular. He suggested that archaeologists actively investigate the following questions: [H]ow did demographic and economic trends in the Assyrian heartland compare or contrast with those in the conquered territories, and what do those trends tell us of the aggregate lows of wealth from one to another?…to what extent [was] the Assyrian economy and quality of life[ ]transformed as a result of successive phases of external conquest? (Adams 1979: 396–397) he study of trends in the regional settlement patterns of the Assyrian Empire, one key to answering Adams’ questions, has progressed a great deal since 1979 and has identiied real, and sometimes dramatic, demographic trends in its territories, at least some of which can conidently be attributed to imperial actions. Regional surveys in the extended “heartland” of Assyria (the Jezirah of northern Syria and Iraq and the Upper Tigris River Valley in southeastern Turkey) show a striking increase in the number and geographical spread of small sites during the Late Iron Age (e.g., Bernbeck 1993; Wilkinson 1995; Morandi Bonacossi 1996; Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000; Parker 2001). his is surely in part to be attributed to the settlement of large numbers of deportees from other parts of the empire in small farming villages in these areas, oten interpreted as the creation of a breadbasket for Assyrian cities (e.g., Wilkinson 1995; Morandi Bonacossi 2000; Parker 2001; Wilkinson et al. 2005). Without more intensive study of these small settlements, however, there is not enough evidence to say whether or not agricultural surpluses were being siphoned of in great quantities to regional centers and imperial capitals, or whether heavy taxes and corvée requirements led to impoverishment and a lower standard of living for the inhabitants of these settlements. It has been argued that at least some of this new settlement could have emerged organically from the sedentarization of mobile populations and the dispersal of the empire in the house, the house in the empire 307 the inhabitants of nucleated settlements due to the new peace brought by the empire (Wilkinson and Barbanes 2000); the lack of a reined pottery chronology for the Jezirah also adds uncertainty to the attribution of increases in settlement to Assyrian imperial policies. he same problem in pottery chronology applies to the provinces of the northern Levant (Lebanon, western Syria, and South-central Turkey) (Akkermans and Schwartz 2003: 368), where regional surveys have generally shown increases in small settlements in the later Iron Age, though this is less dramatic than in the Jezirah (reviewed in Wilkinson et al. 2005). here is currently not enough evidence to conirm the frequent assumption that this region was composed of “provincial and impoverished backwaters” (Hawkins 1982: 425) in the Neo-Assyrian period, as is oten assumed (e.g., Diakonof 1969: 29; Winter 1983: 194; Grayson 1995: 967).3 In the very well-documented southern Levant (Israel, Palestine, and Jordan), by contrast, there is much evidence for the destructions and deportations that accompanied Assyrian conquest, and for the demographic recovery and even lourishing of some areas under Assyrian rule, while other areas remained relatively depopulated (Na’aman 1993). he settlement pattern in the southern Levant has been attributed by some to the deliberate development by the Assyrians of economically productive areas for imperial proit and the abandonment of less productive areas (Gitin 1997; Allen 1997), but it has been just as plausibly attributed to strategic and military concerns in a volatile border region by others (Na’aman 2003; Master 2003). In order to engage fully the question of the impact of Assyrian imperial incorporation on subject populations, the broad brush of regional survey must be complemented by investigations with the iner spatial and diachronic resolution provided by the methodologies of household archaeology. Careful, contextual excavation or surface survey of households, large and small, in diferent kinds of settlements across the empire, can produce evidence for potential changes in prosperity among diferent social and ethnic groups, testing the frequent assumption of the economic exploitation of peripheral populations. 3 Recent publications of excavations of Iron Age II–III sites in the northern Levant demonstrate a variability in the fortunes of these settlements ater Assyrian incorporation similar to that found in the southern Levant, ranging from abandonment (e.g., Tell ʚAcharneh, Cooper and Fortin 2004) or depopulation (e.g., Tell Mishrifeh, Morandi Bonacossi 2009) to continuity (e.g., Tell Tuqan, Bai 2006, 2008) or lourishing (e.g., Tell Ais, Soldi 2009; Tille Höyük, Blaylock 2009). 308 virginia rimmer herrmann his kind of investigation can also identify the potential development of economic rationalizations (such as specialization, intensiication and market participation) and can provide evidence for the impetus behind them, whether top-down (imperially sponsored) or bottom-up (locally initiated). While there has been a substantial increase in the last few decades in the number of Neo-Assyrian period houses, large and small, excavated at provincial sites and even in the Assyrian capitals,4 analysis at the level of the household has so far been largely lacking for the Assyrian Empire, with a few exceptions, such as the investigation and comparison of both lower- and higher-status houses (including microarchaeological analyses) at Ziyaret Tepe (Matney and Rainville 2005) and the study of activity areas in an elite household at Tell Ahmar (Jamieson 2000). Domestic areas at Neo-Assyrian period sites have rarely been approached from the standpoint of identifying trends in domestic economy and social organization accompanying imperial incorporation, however.5 Household Archaeology and Empire he study of empires may have a problem of scale, as the spatial extent and quantity of data related to an empire become almost too large for an individual to handle and the complexity of the phenomenon becomes too great to be described adequately by general models and typologies (Sinopoli 2001: 447–448), but it is now almost a commonplace that issues of societal or interregional scope must be approached 4 E.g., Nineveh (Lumsden 1991); Aššur (Miglus 2000, 2002); Ziyaret Tepe (Matney et al. 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006); Tell Sheikh Hamad (Kühne 1989–1990, 1993–1994, 1994); Tell Ahmar (Bunnens 1999); Tille Höyük (Summers 1991; Blaylock 2009); Lidar Höyük (Müller 1999); Tell Ais (Mazzoni 1987, 2008); Tell Kazel (Capet and Gubel 2000); and Tel Miqne-Ekron (Gitin 1989). 5 An important exception is the comparison by Parker (2003) of the domestic economy of excavated houses at the pre-Assyrian Early Iron Age settlement of Kenan Tepe in the Upper Tigris River Valley with that of a partially excavated house at the Assyrian imperial period “colonial” settlement of Boztepe in the same region. His conclusion from the faunal data and evidence for metal and ceramic production was that Assyrian imperial period households had more specialized economies than preimperial ones, due to Assyrian demands and imperial monopolization of the ceramic and metal industries and the herding of sheep, goat, and cattle. he sample size of the later site is quite small (Parker 2003: 539), however, so these conclusions must be considered quite tentative. the empire in the house, the house in the empire 309 archaeologically from multiple scales (e.g., Lightfoot et al. 1998; Stein 2002: 907), including the ine scale of the individual household and the activities that take place within it. here is a growing recognition, too, that the daily practices carried out in households can be the site of the most fundamental efects of profound political transformations, such as incorporation into a transregional empire, as well as the locus of response to these changes (Lightfoot et al. 1998; Wattenmaker 1998; Hastorf and D’Altroy 2001; Rainville 2005; Sinopoli 2001: 448; Stein 2002). he mélange of imposition and opportunity, violence, and stability that accompanies incorporation into an empire inevitably alters the spectrum of choices available to its subjects in the mundane routines of household life. Changes in political economy have the potential to modify the material and labor demands on subject households, access to resources, and household task scheduling, while shits in the political center can lead to new expressions of status and identity, and the institutions and enlarged borders of an empire can open new social and economic doors for some, while closing them of for others (Sinopoli 1994, 2001). Changing patterns in the debris of these household activities and in the structure and integration of houses can inform us about the impact of imperial incorporation on household production and consumption, economic and social relations between households, and the division of labor and allocation of status within the household. his evidence of the constraints and opportunities presented by an empire to subject households in turn provides a window into how that empire works, the goals of its leaders, the extent to which its propagandistic and ideological claims are enacted on the ground, and how much it involves itself in local afairs. At the same time, the local scale of household archaeology, allowing a focus on the context of actions and intrasocietal diversity, can redress the top-down biases of macromodels of empire by making space for the agency of imperial subjects and their potential to respond to changing conditions in varied ways. In recent years, several studies of households in New World empires have illustrated the potential of a household archaeology approach to produce evidence of the real consequences of these empires for the daily lives of their subjects, and provide a new understanding of the empires themselves. Brumiel’s intensive surface surveys of several sites in Mexico under Aztec hegemony have found evidence of intensiication and specialization in women’s household crat and food production in certain regions, which she attributes both to increased 310 virginia rimmer herrmann tribute demands and increased market participation (1991). She has also noted changes in the labor intensity of food preparation and in the foods consumed, as more portable foods were necessary for laborers working far from home on state projects (1991), and a decline in the status displays of local elites through decorated serving vessels, as local competition waned with imperial centralization of power (1987). he excavations and surface surveys of the Upper Mantaro Archaeological Research Project in Peru have produced studies of changes and continuities in the architecture, agropastoral production, diet, crat production and consumption, technology, and elite-commoner relations of households in a region that fell under the Inca Empire, with results that oten contradicted the investigators’ expectations and produced new insights into the nature, goals, and activities of that empire (Costin et al. 1989; Hastorf and Johannessen 1993; D’Altroy and Hastorf 2001). At sites in the Spanish-American Empire, detailed contextual studies of households have shown how intermarriages between Spanish men and Native American women created a creolized culture relected in the mix of European and American material culture in diferent spheres of household life, while in other cases the adoption of European material culture followed class, rather than ethnic lines (Deagan 1998, 2001). Studies such as these, combining detailed analyses of artifact and ecofact patterning on a small scale with a comparative approach that identiies trends at an imperial scale, show how it is possible to approach fundamental questions about these early empires that have too long remained unaddressed, but from an analytical level that is appropriate to an agent-oriented perspective. Household Archaeology on Assyria’s Northwestern Periphery From its beginnings in 2006, a major goal of the new excavations at Zincirli Höyük (ancient Samʙal) in southern Turkey by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Schloen and Fink 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c) has been the excavation of an extensive area of the city’s lower town, which was let nearly untouched by the German expeditions of more than a century ago (von Luschan et al. 1893; von Luschan et al. 1898; von Luschan 1902; von Luschan and Jacoby 1911; von Luschan and Andrae 1943; cf. Wartke 2005), with the intention of exposing a substantial expanse of domestic architecture for the irst time at this site (Fig. 1). he large lower town of this 40 ha site was the empire in the house, the house in the empire 311 Figure 1. Plan of Iron Age remains at Samʙal (modern Zincirli Höyük) excavated by German archaeologists in the late nineteenth century (drawn by Robert Koldewey in 1894; from von Luschan et al. 1898: Tafel XXIX). Dark gray blocks represent the 2006–2008 excavation areas of the University of Chicago Expedition. 312 virginia rimmer herrmann irst occupied during the earlier part of the Iron Age II, when the city of Samʙal was the royal seat of YʙDY, a small Syro-Hittite Kingdom ruled by a West-Semitic-speaking dynasty. Although the citadel mound continued to be occupied as the seat of the Assyrian provincial governor ater the kingdom came under Assyrian direct rule sometime in the late eighth century bce, the fate of the lower town during the Assyrian period was unknown until the renewed investigations of the University of Chicago at the site, which were fairly quickly able to establish that the lower town continued to be inhabited under Assyrian rule in the seventh century and was never thereater reoccupied. Consequently, the Assyrian period and earlier Iron Age II remains of the lower town are easily accessible beneath the modern surface, undisturbed by later occupation levels. his situation creates an excellent opportunity to investigate continuities and changes in domestic life between pre-Assyrian and Assyrian period levels and in this way to evaluate the it of contrasting macromodels of Assyrian rule to this provincial city. Any large-scale model of the way empires work is bound to be lawed, defeated by the complexity and diversity of these polities. Rather than abandon the attempt to understand broad historical processes, however, the contrasts between such models can be used as a heuristic tool in the interpretation of human-scale data. In order to bridge the inferential gap between these models of imperial scope and archaeological investigations of a necessarily more limited scale, though, it is necessary to tailor the research questions and methodologies of such a project very carefully. In order to assess the utility of the two models or perspectives on Assyrian rule broadly deined above, the core-periphery and its converse (called here the patrimonial model, ater Eisenstadt 1979), by means of household archaeology, detailed sets of predictions for the domestic economy and social structure of provincial inhabitants that follow from the assumptions of each general model and can be expected to be detectable in the archaeological record must irst be deined. hese testable predictions should also incorporate what is known from the textual record of the economic organization of the Assyrian Empire (Postgate 1974, 1979; Grayson 1995) and in this case of the kingdom of Samʙal or YʙDY (Sader 1987: 177–178). he archaeological evidence will inevitably be less clear cut than we would like, but the creation of a heuristic framework such as this can help us to interpret the various trends displayed by the debris of domestic life in a potentially useful way. the empire in the house, the house in the empire 313 Expectations of the Core-Periphery Model he core-periphery model of empire posits an empire-wide, systematic rationalization of interference in imperial territories according to a principle of economic maximization. his is presumed to have worked to the beneit of the core population and to the detriment of the peripheral population. he key expectations of this model for the economy of the provinces are thus intensiication (of production of crat and agricultural goods to meet heightened core demands), integration (greater individual and regional specialization, greater reliance on rations or the market for subsistence, less household and neighborhood self-suiciency), and impoverishment (due to the increased material and labor demands of the state, the competitive advantage of Assyrian traders, and a decrease in access to productive resources) (cf. Parker’s predictions for rural settlements in imperial provinces [2003: 553]; Matthews 2003: Table 5.1; Hastorf and D’Altroy 2001: 22–24, for the Inca Empire). According to this model, the economic production of the city of Samʙal would be predicted to be targeted for development (cf. Gitin 1997: 83–84) by Assyrian administrators. Samʙal is strategically located with respect to mineral and timber resources, which we know from accounts of its tribute6 were highly valued by the Assyrians, and lies in a fertile agricultural plain with plentiful pasture land. he agricultural and “industrial” production (of timber and metals in particular) of the city would be expected to have been regionally specialized and intensiied for export (in order to generate revenue) or to supply the Assyrian army or garrison, while the countryside would have been used as a breadbasket to support Assyrian elite and military endeavors. he provincial government would hold a monopoly on metallurgy, timber processing and export, and perhaps even ceramic production and herding (Parker 2003: 553) and would strictly limit the access of local inhabitants to valuable raw materials. Taxes in kind and in labor on government agricultural, construction, and resource procurement projects (as ilku service) would be harsh. 6 Received from Hayanu of YʙDY by Shalmaneser III in 857 bc: 10 talents of silver, 90 talents of copper, 30 talents of iron, 300 garments with multicolored fringe and linen garments, 300 cattle, 3000 sheep, 200 cedar trunks, 2 homers of cedar resin, and his daughter with her dowry. Annual tribute: 10 minas of silver, 100 cedar trunks, and 1 homer of cedar resin (Sader 1987: 153–154). 314 virginia rimmer herrmann In the archaeological record of Zincirli/Samʙal, concomitant with intensiication, specialization, and government monopoly, one would expect to ind evidence for more concentrated, larger-scale (“factory”) production and storage of agricultural and crat goods, such as grain, metals, ceramics, textiles, hides, and timber, probably connected in some way with Assyrian public buildings or with evidence for imperial control. At the same time, one might expect to see a sharp reduction in evidence for several types of small-scale crat production in households and dispersed workshops compared with the pre-Assyrian period. As urban inhabitants became more dependent on the state for their subsistence, relying on rations (in the case of “commoners”) or rural estates (in the case of elites), and less self-suicient, with reduced access to productive resources, evidence for agricultural activities and processing (in the form of grain storage vessels and installations, processing debris, and agricultural implements) in the household would also decrease compared with the pre-Assyrian period. he onerous labor and produce taxes imposed by the Assyrian administration would engender a general impoverishment of provincial inhabitants. his might be relected by a decrease in the size and quality of domestic architecture, with a reduced use of timber in construction, as access to this resource was restricted. he average diet might decline in quality, as relected in botanical and faunal remains, with less variety of plants and animals and particularly less, or poorer-quality meat, due to government monopolies on herds and intensiication and specialization in crop production. Vessels for cooking and serving might even change to accommodate less time-consuming or more portable foods, as more time was spent by household members away from the home performing state service (Brumiel 1991). Access to crat goods and status items might also be limited, as is relected in the small inds associated with commoner households. Assyria’s commercial interests would dictate that evidence for trade connections in the form of imported artifacts would narrow to a main line with the Assyrian heartland, rather than relecting trade with Phoenicia, Egypt, Cyprus, or Anatolia. Finally, one would expect that before Assyrian incorporation, the residential areas of the city would have been organized into neighborhoods integrated by kinship and patronage networks, containing some shared facilities and consisting of households of various sizes, including a number of extended families (Stone and Zimansky 1992; Schloen 2001). he interests of the Assyrian government in higher tax revenues and labor eiciency (Hastorf and D’Altroy 2001: 23; Galil 2007: 347), the empire in the house, the house in the empire 315 however, and the increased reliance of provincial inhabitants on the state, rather than on their traditional networks, for subsistence, would predict a reorganization of these neighborhoods into smaller, nuclear-family households (relected in house size and installations) without obvious spatial or economic interconnection. In some parts of the city, though, one would expect a replacement of earlier neighborhoods by the large houses in imperial Assyrian style of Assyrian oicials, compensated for their oice and rewarded for their loyalty by large provincial landholdings and clustering in the provincial capital (Postgate 1979: 216). Expectations of the Patrimonial Model If we instead adopt a perspective that takes seriously the ideological statements of the Assyrian kings, we should not necessarily expect to see a geographically dichotomous drain of material beneits from the peripheral provinces to the core provinces, but rather that diferent social groups beneited or sufered across the empire. For, ater the depredations of conquest, every newly incorporated province was on equal symbolic footing as part of the “Land of Assur” (as opposed to the client states, which constituted the “yoke of Assur”) (Postgate 1992), regardless of its proximity to the Assyrian core or the ethnicity of its inhabitants. It certainly “paid” to be on the side of the king of Assyria, but there were individuals and groups across the empire who took advantage of the opportunities for advancement presented by the imperial administration and army, sometimes at the expense of the king’s rivals in Assyria (Lanfranchi 1997; Lumsden 2001). In Eisenstadt’s model of “patrimonial” versus “bureaucratic” empires, the expansion of a patrimonial empire such as Assyria would be accompanied by relatively little deliberate restructuring of its peripheral territories. Patrimonial kingdoms would intrude on “local . . . communities mainly in the form of administration of law, attempts to maintain peace, exaction of taxation and the maintenance of some cultural and/or religious links to the center” (Eisenstadt 1979: 23), and “insofar as the rulers of these regimes engaged in more active economic policies…these were irst…mostly of expansive character—i.e., aiming at expansion of control of large territories, rather than intrinsic ones— i.e., characterized by intensive exploitation of a ixed resource basis” (Eisenstadt 1979: 24). 316 virginia rimmer herrmann According to this perspective, then, we should expect to ind only a fairly supericial, rather than thoroughgoing, restructuring of the provincial capital Samʙal, concentrated mainly in the citadel, in contrast to the intensive, calculated exploitation expected by the core-periphery model. he inhabitants of the province would now be subject to the authority, as well as the protection of the Assyrian king, and we should ind Assyrian expropriations no more punitive or innovative in this peripheral province than they were in the imperial heartland. he expectation of the patrimonial model for Samʙal is thus one of fundamental continuity in household economic practices and social structure. Such social and economic continuity should be relected in a higher degree of continuity in the archaeological record of the site between the pre-Assyrian and Assyrian provincial periods, particularly in the urban plan and the location and scale of the evidence for productive activities. Most crat production would still take the form of household cottage industry or small workshops, even when performed part of the time at the behest of the administration or the army, and most households would still be self-suicient in agricultural production. Access to natural resources would have remained a mixture of state controlled and private or communal, though through the greater labor power that it was able to command and the reduction in hostilities between neighboring regions, the empire might have opened up new natural resources and lands for imperial exploitation (Costin 1998b; Wilkinson et al. 2005). hough there must have been occasional extraordinary musters of labor and goods for the activities of the army, general levels of taxation in produce and labor would not have drastically increased from their pre-Assyrian levels in the kingdom of Samʙal. One would not, therefore, expect to ind evidence for a general impoverishment of the non-Assyrian population, as relected in the evidence for diet, domestic architecture, and consumption of crat and trade goods, though the fortunes of individual households might have gone up or down, depending on their place in the new political order. Trade in general would have been encouraged as a source of imperial revenue (from gate, harbor, and ferry tarifs), without favoring ethnically Assyrian merchants or products from Assyria (Radner 1999). Kinship and neighborhood networks would still be evident in residential patterns, and we might even see the formation of larger households as an attempt to lessen tax and labor duties (Hastorf and D’Altroy 2001: 23). the empire in the house, the house in the empire 317 Two contrasting aspects of the nature of empires, however, would ensure that this basic continuity was not total. First, the devastations and deportations that the Assyrians carried out in many parts of the empire would have had a long-term impact in some areas, as their economic and demographic base was severely damaged. At a site that was destroyed and rebuilt and whose population was deported and replaced with other deportees, we would expect certain changes in domestic economies and neighborhood structure, as the newcomers would be more reliant on the state for their livelihood. We know nothing of the circumstances of Samʙal’s transition from the status of client kingdom to Assyrian province, but it seems to have occurred peacefully sometime in the 720s bce (Landsberger 1948: 77; Hawkins 1982: 415–416), as there is no textual or archaeological evidence for the destruction of the site or the deportation of its inhabitants. he lack of a destruction layer ushering in Assyrian direct rule at Zincirli and the level of preservation and clear chronological horizon it would provide have the disadvantage of making chronological and functional interpretations more challenging at this site. his is also, in a way, an advantage for an investigation of economic and social transformations caused by Assyrian administration, however, because it removes the factors of drastic disruptions, such as destructions and deportations, as possible sources for any changes that are evident and allows us to focus on the impact of Assyrian policies and attitudes instead. Following the violence of conquest, incorporation into the Assyrian Empire brought an imposed peace with neighboring regions and internal stability that may have fostered economic prosperity, and presented new opportunities for production and trade (Eisenstadt 1979; Mazzoni 2000; Naʙaman 2003). According to the inscriptions of its rulers, the kingdom of Samʙal/YʚDY had been plagued with internecine violence during the early eighth century bce that had a disruptive and negative efect on the local economy. he inscriptions of the two last known rulers of Samʙal, Panamuwa II and Bar-Rakib, loyal Assyrian vassals appointed by Tiglath-Pileser III, boast of prosperity restored to Samʙal during their reigns (Tropper 1993). We do not know if this prosperity was general or restricted to followers of these kings, but it may have persisted for many years ater the apparently seamless transition to Assyrian direct rule. Furthermore, by increasing interactions among strangers (Bloch and Parry 1989), some of the efects of political uniication under the Assyrian Empire, such as an increase in trade and communications created by stability and the opening of new markets, 318 virginia rimmer herrmann the reshuling of landholdings, and the disruption of traditional local aristocracies, could have had the unintended consequence of creating the conditions for a greater degree of diferentiation and depersonalization in economic and social life (Eisenstadt 1979: 26–27). For this reason, one might expect to ind certain changes in the households of Zincirli that do not imply imperial sponsorship, but are instead indicative of “bottom-up” processes of change (initiated by imperial subjects in response to changed conditions) that could include a measure of economic rationalization. An increase in interregional trade contacts with the expansion of economic networks and the opening of new trade routes and opportunities in a context of regional stability might be relected in an increase in imported items and external stylistic inluence from numerous sources within and without the empire, not only Assyria. With new markets and opportunities, we might also see an increase in economic specialization at a decentralized, dispersed household level, relected both in changes in the evidence for crat and agricultural production in the household, and in an increase in the standardization of crats not highly valued by imperial authorities, such as commonware ceramics, igurines, and amulets (Sinopoli and Morrison 1995; Lehmann 1998). hough these increases in specialization and economic integration are supericially similar to the predictions of the core-periphery model, the locations and types of materials in which these changes would appear would clearly distinguish them from state-sponsored initiatives. Conclusion he contrasts between the expectations of these two models of the Assyrian Empire for the fate of the inhabitants of the province of Samʙal may be somewhat overdrawn here for heuristic purposes, and the archaeological data will surely ofer ambiguities, but looking at the domestic remains of Zincirli’s lower town with these alternatives in mind can be a useful way of approaching the transition from preimperial to imperial rule at this site. In the new excavations at Zincirli by the University of Chicago, an area of 400 m2 that included domestic remains was excavated just inside the southern city gate (Area 4) in 2007, and in 2008, a 450 m2 area in the northern lower town (Area 5) was selected for excavation based on the indications from a magnetometry survey of the lower town that the empire in the house, the house in the empire 319 the area would span several smaller buildings (assumed to be small houses) and part of one larger building (assumed to be a larger, courtyard-centered house). he Area 5 buildings do seem to be domestic in nature, containing domestic items such as grindstones, spindle whorls, and loom weights, as well as installations such as ovens and mortars, and are stratiied in two to three subphases from the seventh century back at least to the early eighth century bce. One of the buildings housed the mortuary cult of a royal oicial named KTMW during the mid- to late eighth century bce, as evidenced by the inscribed mortuary stele recovered there in situ, though it later changed function when the mortuary cult ceased (Struble and Herrmann 2009). here is a high degree of architectural continuity between the phases of Area 5 across the transition to Assyrian direct rule, but the analysis of activity areas in order to identify trends in the domestic economy is still ongoing. Area 5 will be doubled in size in 2009 and further expanded in future seasons in order to obtain a large data set and seek evidence of variability between households as well as over time. Future publications will detail the results of this long-term project. In addition to standard excavation practices, a program of sampling for microartifact analysis and soil chemistry analysis (by means of ICPAES) of living surfaces and installations in the lower-town excavation areas was initiated in the 2008 season. hese kinds of microanalyses are becoming increasingly important in archaeological studies of households and can provide evidence for the presence, location, and intensity of diferent kinds of crat and food production, as well as traic patterns and cleaning habits, supplementing inferences drawn from architecture, installations and (macro)artifacts (Sherwood et al. 1995; Middleton and Price 1996; Wells 2004; Rainville 2005; Özbal 2006; Barba 2007). Densities of microscopic materials indicative of diferent kinds of activities can then be compared between diferent phases and rebuildings of the lower-town architecture in order to identify changes and continuities in household practices. Ideally, the application of this approach to the new excavations at Zincirli will provide an example of the potential of household archaeology for the study of broader issues in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. If this kind of investigation is adopted more widely, the results of this project will eventually be able to be compared with those from sites in diferent parts of the empire, from the Assyrian heartland to its provinces in the Jezirah, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, and Babylonia, enabling an exploration of the extent to which inhabitants 320 virginia rimmer herrmann of the core and the periphery had diferent experiences of the empire and how local histories and conditions might have afected these experiences. he methods and questions of household archaeology can play an important role in the efort to better understand one of the key issues in the study of the Assyrian Empire and ancient empires in general. Adams’ “basic philosophical diferences” must be put into concrete terms that can be tested, for the implications of these diferences would certainly have had tangible consequences for ordinary households. A focus on households in imperial transition can also help redress the top-down disposition of much work on the Assyrian Empire by providing an agent-oriented perspective of the empire “from below.”