The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes

The Archaeology of Imperial Landscapes examines the transformation of rural landscapes and societies that formed the backbone of ancient empires in the Near East and Mediterranean. Through a comparative approach to archaeological data, it analyses the patterns of transformation in widely differing imperial contexts in the ancient world. Bringing together a range of studies by an international team of scholars, the volume shows that empires were dynamic, diverse, and experimental polities, and that their success or failure was determined by a combination of forceful interventions, as well as the new possibilities for those dominated by empires to collaborate and profit from doing so. By highlighting the processes that occur in rural and peripheral landscapes, the volume demonstrates that the archaeology of these non-urban and literally eccentric spheres can provide an important contribution to our understanding of ancient empires. The ‘bottom up’ approach to the study of ancient empires is crucial to understanding how these remarkable socio-political organisms could exist and persist.

Author Biography

Bleda S. Düring is Associate Professor in Near Eastern Archaeology at the Faculty of Archaeology of Universiteit Leiden. He directed an ERC Starting Grant Research project (2012-2016) on the archaeology of the early Assyrian Empire. He is the author of The Prehistory of Asia Minor (Cambridge, 2010). Tesse D. Stek is Associate Professor in Mediterranean Archaeology and Head of the World Archaeology Department of the Faculty of Archaeology of Universiteit Leiden. He coordinates the NWO funded research project Landscapes of Early Roman colonization and is the author of Cult places and cultural change in Republican Italy and co-editor of Roman Republican Colonization (2014) and The Impact of Rome on Cult Places and Religious Practices in Ancient Italy (2015).