Salvin, A; (2014) House and Household in Third Millennium Mesopotamian Society: archaeological perspectives. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

There have been few studies in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology that concentrated on domestic buildings. While there is an extensive knowledge of temples and palaces much less is on record about houses. Traditional studies are biased and have paid little attention to the less spectacular residential districts. This is a serious lack in the knowledge of Mesopotamian culture, considered the importance of the house in the society, as the main space of social dynamics. Publications of Mesopotamian domestic architecture usually consist of reports from excavations and remain at this stage; this means that they tend to be limited to one site and generally lack the development of a longer-term architectural analysis. The purpose of this thesis is to address this gap, analysing the characteristics and the variations of Mesopotamian houses. Moreover the majority of the studies have not related household-level evidences to the emergence of urbanism. This research takes into consideration sites of third millennium Mesopotamia in order to analyse them as case studies. The third millennium in Mesopotamia is a critical period of early urbanisation. It is very signi cant to look at how space was used in houses to understand the culture of this period. The intent of this thesis is to identify common aspects and di erences, and relate those characteristics to the socio-economical history of the period to broaden the understanding of this interesting period in Mesopotamian culture. To examine variations and use of space seven sites were analysed from north, centre and south Mesopotamia for a total number of 68 house plans. Many methods have been utilised to analyse the evidence such as ground plan analysis, context analysis, access analysis based on Hillier and Hanson syntax model.

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