The Amuq Valley Regional Project 1995-1998

The Amuq plain in southeast Turkey is of major importance to the development of Near Eastern cultural sequences. Recent investigations of geoarchaeology, settlement patterns, and individual sites now provide a framework for the assessment of the original work by the University of Chicago and Sir Leonard Woolley. Geoarchaeological investigations provide a dynamic context for the interpretation of settlement patterns and show that sedimentation over the plain has been variable and patchy. The density and patterning of settlement has changed through time, partly in response to changes in the local environment, partly as a result of developments in the political economy. Excavations at Tells Kurdu and al-Judaidah as well as section-cleaning operations at other sites in the area have started to provide a radiocarbon framework for the original chronology and are filling in gaps in that sequence. At the site of Kurdu, approximately 15 hectares in area, domestic and perhaps public architecture are now being defined more coherently than in the first investigations, and the excavations are supplying insights into a subsistence economy that tapped into a verdant mosaic of local environments.