Titriş Höyük: The Nature and Context of Third Millennium B.C.E. Urbanism in the Upper Euphrates Basin

This article discusses findings from excavations at Titriş Höyük. At the time of its foundation as an urban center in the Middle Early Bronze Age, Titriş Höyük possessed the combined advantages of locally available timber, multiple perennial water sources and associated year-round cultivable floodplains suited to garden crops, and broad, rain-fed arable tracts suited to grain cultivation. Additionally, the site was surrounded by gentle limestone hills well suited to viticulture and livestock grazing. However, this benign framework provided a necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of the site. The sufficient condition was the city's location along the road to the Samsat ford, which made it a natural arbiter of a portion of long-distance east–west trade across the northern fringes of “Greater Mesopotamia” in the third millennium—a fact attested by the number and variety of imports found in excavated mortuary and domestic contexts across the city.

Since Herodotus, Has History Been a Valid Concept?

This paper argues: (1) that there is no meaningful philosophical and practical distinction between history and prehistory until sometime in the Lower Paleolithic; and (2) because history as we practice it is a human invention (usually attributed to Herodotus), perhaps prehistory should be reserved as a term to describe how humans dealt with the past prior to the fifth century B.C. Philosophical underpinnings for the argument are taken from Collingwood; practical examples are drawn from personal experiences in the archaeology and history of Greater Mesopotamia.