2020 US Fellows

As long as archaeology can remember, humans have made symbol and substance of Northern Mesopotamian landscapes. The agricultural and urban landscapes expanding across the region today are the consequence of millennia upon millennia of societies making and remaking themselves and their environments. Paleolithic Shanidari foragers; Neolithic Hassunan farmers; Chalcolithic Uruk expats; rival imperialists in the (to collapse many taxonomies) Bronze Age Akkadians and Sumerians and Iron Age Assyrians and Babylonians; Greek and Persian and briefly Roman conquerors; and finally Arab, Ottoman, and British administrators—all of them played a role in shaping the sociology and ecology of Northern Mesopotamia, which continues to grow and change in the context of the modern Iraqi state.

Data gathered by the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) shows us the human side of this drama, but historical and paleoclimatic archives tell us that environmental change also played its part. Indeed, the palimpsests of irrigation features recorded by EPAS attest the braided history of Mesopotamian socioecosystems. To tell this story in full, we must collect local-scale paleolandscape data to link regional social and environmental histories. In Brown’s capacity as EPAS geoarchaeologist, he began this work with preliminary survey in October 2019, and propose to continue it now, remotely, working with existing historical, remote-sensing, and survey data to model present and ancient environments and identify important locations for field investigation, which will be pursued in collaboration with locally-based EPAS team members and government or academic researchers, laying intellectual and logistical groundwork for intensive geoarchaeological fieldwork.

Cole’s dissertation, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law, and Capital in Gilded Age Basra,” locates the emergence of capitalism and the modern state in the Ottoman Persian Gulf city of Basra in elite manipulations of novel state instruments and vocabularies. Through a microhistorical examination of the social, intellectual, and political worlds of Basrawi capitalists, her dissertation understands issues normally associated with state centralization – tax collection, nationality, and land registration, among others – as crucial to the making of a global Gilded Age. Tracing how elite appropriation of state tools created new kinds of disorder, Cole argues that capitalism emerged through the actions of capitalists who manipulated state instruments, human relationships, and regional ecologies in pursuit of accumulation. During her TARII fellowships, Cole will collect materials needed to revise the dissertation for publication as a book manuscript, and will conduct preliminary research for her second book project, a global history of the concession.

Taylor’s dissertation explores the ways in which nonhuman actors created and shaped realities within the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE). Through three case studies, she develops a posthumanist Mesopotamian art history—that is, an art history that removes the human from the center of scholarly inquiry in favor of an approach that views humans and nonhumans as equally agentive and enmeshed beyond separation. The three case studies examine the so-called Banquet Stele, the colossi and ivories, and the garment embellishments on the bas-reliefs through concepts of memory, gender, and space, respectively. The dissertation offers new approaches to study the Northwest Palace that generate compelling ways of thinking about things, humans, and agents in the ancient Near East. Taylor will use her TARII fellowship to conduct essential research for her dissertation at the British Museum.

Young’s dissertation investigates the changing place of Basra and its hinterlands in the political economies of Iraq and the Persian Gulf between the 1920s and 1960s. Although late Ottoman Basra was a cosmopolitan node in Gulf networks of trade, migration, and empire, the city is nearly absent in discussions of the political geography of modern Iraq or the politics of the contemporary Gulf. This erasure reinforces conceptions of both as spatially and politically artificial.

His project asks how Basra became provincial and peripheral in the new national space of Iraq, and what this meant for the political economy of the Gulf region. With the TARII fellowship Young will research two specific sub-topics that each shed light on state formation and transnational urbanization in Basra: first, the business competitions over Mandate-era transportation infrastructures; and second, the nationalization of the regional date trade amid the postwar development of the Basrawi oil industry.

These fellowships are funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs through a sub-grant from the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.