Once There Was a Place: Settlement Archaeology at Chagar Bazar, 1999-2002

McMahon (archaeology, U. of Cambridge) tells a story about the site, now in northern Iraq near the borders with Syria and Turkey, that begins in the sixth millennium BC, focuses on the Old Babylonian settlement there in the second millennium BC, and continues through the early excavations during the 1930s and the resumed excavations since 1999 as a joint project of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, the University of Liege, and the Syrian Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums. The approach is settlement archaeology, which embraces activity areas and buildings, households and communities, and landscapes and environments; a settlement is both a physical locus and a cultural idea, she explains, a home to both actors and systems. Among the topics are community buildings, neighborhood dynamics, burial practices, ceramic assemblage and social inference, objects, and Chagar Bazar as a place in the landscape. Monochrome maps, photographs, and drawings are included, but no index. Distributed in North America by The David Brown Book Co. Annotation c2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Augusta McMahon is a University Senior Lecturer at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Archaeology and a Fellow of Newnham College, IK. She was Co-Director of the recent Chagar Bazar excavations and is currently the Field Director of the Tell Brak Excavations in Syria. Carlo Colantoni is a post-doctoral researcher with the Topoi Project on Formation and Transformation of Space at the Freie Universitat in Berlin. Julia Frane is an independent scholar who has previously researched the early 2nd millennium BC ceramic assemblage at Tell Leilan, Syria. Arkadiusz Soltysiak is a Lecturer at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Warsaw, Poland, and is currently the human remains analyst for archaeological projects at Tell Brak, Tell Arbid, and many other sites in the Middle East.