Harvey Weiss is an archaeologist who teaches at Yale University. [1]
Weiss received his B.A. from The City College, CUNY in 1966, and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976. [2]
Weiss has directed the Yale University Tell Leilan Project's excavations and surveys in northeastern Syria since 1978. His most recent contribution to environmental archaeology has been his hypothesis that abrupt, century-scale, climate changes altered prehistoric and ancient West Asian societies' developmental trajectories, such as the abrupt climate change 4,200 years before present that reduced agricultural production in northern Mesopotamia, forced regional abandonment and habitat-tracking, disrupted Akkadian imperial revenues, and thereby forced the political collapse in southern Mesopotamia. [1] [3]
The Akkadian Empire was the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia, after the long-lived civilization of Sumer. It was centered in the city of Akkad and its surrounding region. The empire united Akkadian and Sumerian speakers under one rule. The Akkadian Empire exercised influence across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia, sending military expeditions as far south as Dilmun and Magan in the Arabian Peninsula.
The Levant is the large area in Southwest Asia, south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea in the west, the Arabian Desert in the south, and Mesopotamia in the east. It stretches 400 miles north to south from the Taurus Mountains to the Sinai desert, and 70 to 100 miles east to west between the sea and the Arabian desert. The term is also sometimes used to refer to modern events or states in the region immediately bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea: Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Hatay Province of Turkey.
Mesopotamia is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. In terms of the modern nation-state it corresponds with much of Iraq, Kuwait, the eastern parts of Syria, Southeastern Turkey, and regions along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders.
The Fertile Crescent is a crescent-shaped region in the Middle East, spanning modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, together with the southeastern region of Turkey and the western fringes of Iran. Some authors also include Cyprus.
Sumer is the earliest known civilization in the historical region of southern Mesopotamia, emerging during the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Ages between the sixth and fifth millennium BC. It is also one of the first civilizations in the world, along with Ancient Egypt, Norte Chico, the Minoan civilization, and the Indus Valley Civilization. Living along the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, Sumerian farmers grew an abundance of grain and other crops, the surplus from which enabled them to form urban settlements. Prehistoric proto-writing dates back before 3000 BC. The earliest texts come from the cities of Uruk and Jemdet Nasr, and date to between c. 3500 and c. 3000 BC.
Kish was an ancient tell of Sumer in Mesopotamia, considered to have been located near the modern Tell al-Uhaymir in the Babil Governorate of Iraq, east of Babylon and 80 km (50 mi) south of Baghdad.
The Ubaid period is a prehistoric period of Mesopotamia. The name derives from Tell al-'Ubaid where the earliest large excavation of Ubaid period material was conducted initially by Henry Hall and later by Leonard Woolley.
A cradle of civilization is a location where civilization is understood to have independently emerged. According to current thinking, there was no single "cradle" of civilization; instead, several cradles of civilization developed independently. The Fertile Crescent and Ancient India are believed to be the earliest, while Ancient China emerged somewhat later. The extent to which there was significant influence between the early civilizations of the Near East and those of East Asia is disputed. Scholars accept the fact that the civilizations of Mesoamerica, those that mainly existed in modern-day Mexico, and the civilization in Norte Chico, a region in the north-central coastal region of Peru, emerged independently from those in the Old World.
Environmental archaeology is a sub-field of archaeology which emerged in 1970s and is the science of reconstructing the relationships between past societies and the environments they lived in. The field represents an archaeological-palaeoecological approach to studying the palaeoenvironment through the methods of human palaeoecology. Reconstructing past environments and past peoples' relationships and interactions with the landscapes they inhabited provides archaeologists with insights into the origin and evolution of anthropogenic environments, and prehistoric adaptations and economic practices.
Shamshi-Adad was an Amorite who had conquered lands across much of Syria, Anatolia, and Upper Mesopotamia for the Old Assyrian Empire.
Tell Leilan is an archaeological site situated near the Wadi Jarrah in the Khabur River basin in Al-Hasakah Governorate, northeastern Syria, a region formerly a part of ancient Assyria. The site has been occupied since the 5th millennium BC. During the late third millennium, the site was known as Shekhna. During that time it was under control of the Akkadian Empire. Around 1800 BC, the site was renamed "Shubat-Enlil" by the Assyrian king, Shamshi-Adad I and it became the capital of Assyria in northern Mesopotamia. Shubat-Enlil was abandoned around 1700 BC.
Gregory Louis Possehl was a Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and curator of the Asian Collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He has been involved in excavations of the Indus Valley Civilization in India and Pakistan since 1964, and is an author of many books and articles on the Indus Civilization and related topics. He received his BA in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1964, his MA in Anthropology from the University of Washington in 1967, and his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1974. He has conducted major excavations in Gujarat, Rajasthan (Gilund), and in January 2007, began an excavation at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Bat in the Sultanate of Oman.
Tell Brak was an ancient city in Syria; its remains constitute a tell located in the Upper Khabur region, near the modern village of Tell Brak, 50 kilometers north-east of Al-Hasaka city, Al-Hasakah Governorate. The city's original name is unknown. During the second half of the third millennium BC, the city was known as Nagar and later on, Nawar.
The history of Mesopotamia ranges from the earliest human occupation in the Lower Sumaya period up to the Late antiquity. This history is pieced together from evidence retrieved from archaeological excavations and, after the introduction of writing in the late 4th millennium BC, an increasing amount of historical sources. While in the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods only parts of Upper Mesopotamia were occupied, the southern alluvium was settled during the late Neolithic period. Mesopotamia has been home to many of the oldest major civilizations, entering history from the Early Bronze Age, for which reason it is often dubbed the cradle of civilization.
The 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event was one of the most severe climatic events of the Holocene epoch. It defines the beginning of the current Meghalayan age in the Holocene epoch.
In archaeology, the classic Maya collapse is the decline of the Classic Maya civilization and the abandonment of Maya cities in the southern Maya lowlands of Mesoamerica between the 8th and 9th centuries, at the end of the Classic Maya Period. The Preclassic Maya experienced a similar collapse in the 2nd century.
The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, ancient Iran, Anatolia/Asia Minor and the Armenian Highlands, the Levant, Cyprus and the Arabian Peninsula. The ancient Near East is studied in the fields of Ancient Near East studies, Near Eastern archaeology and ancient history.
Akkad was the name of a Mesopotamian city and its surrounding area. Akkad was the capital of the Akkadian Empire, which was the dominant political force in Mesopotamia during a period of about 150 years in the last third of the 3rd millennium BC.
The Amorites were an ancient Semitic-speaking people from the Levant who also occupied large parts of southern Mesopotamia from the 21st century BC to the end of the 17th century BC, where they established several prominent city-states in existing locations, such as Isin, Larsa and later notably Babylon, which was raised from a small town to an independent state and a major city. The term Amurru in Akkadian and Sumerian texts refers to both of them and to their principal deity.
Indus–Mesopotamia relations are thought to have developed during the second half of 3rd millennium BCE, until they came to a halt with the extinction of the Indus valley civilization after around 1900 BCE. Mesopotamia had already been an intermediary in the trade of lapis lazuli between South Asia and Egypt since at least about 3200 BCE, in the context of Egypt-Mesopotamia relations.