Material Worlds: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Contacts and Exchange in the Ancient Near East

Cultural contacts and exchange are constituents of human behavior – ancient and modern. Within archaeology, particularly in that of Western Asia, the topic and related phenomena have been intensively studied during the last decades, leading to a re-evaluation of the cultural and economic, as well as physical landscapes throughout the ancient Near East. The eleven contributions in this book were delivered at a workshop held in 2016 at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World by renowned experts in their fields. They address the history of contacts and exchanges in the Bronze and Iron Ages using case studies from different regions and based on different types of sources. The contributions illustrate that the geographical dimension of cultural contacts and exchange networks within West Asia extends far beyond the boundaries of the previously defined contact zone of the ‘Ancient Near East’ and that other systems existed in adjacent regions (Egypt, Arabia as well as Iran, Central Asia, Africa, India, and South Asia), suggesting that the West Asian networks were also part of larger ones. At the same time, it has become clear that a closer look at single case studies of specific material culture datasets is important to better understand the dynamics, scale(s), and extent of contacts and exchanges.

Contributing authors: Gojko Barjamovic (Harvard University), Celia J. Bergoffen (Fashion Institute of Technology, New York), Lorenzo D’Alfonso (NYU, New York), Nancy A. Highcock (The British Museum, London), Robert W. Homsher (San Francisco), Alice M. W. Hunt (University of Georgia, Athens), Marta Luciani (University of Vienna), Maria Grazia Masetti-Rouault (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris), Beate Pongratz-Leisten (NYU, New York), Lisa Saladino Haney (Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh), Jonathan Valk (University of Helsinki).