Assyrian Research and Micro-Archaeology

I have been working in Turkey (the northern edge of ancient Mesopotamia) since 1995. I have worked at Early Bronze Age Sites (Titrish Höyük, Kazane) and Iron Age Sites (Ziyaret Tepe), as well as Gordion, Hacinebi Tepe, and Tell Brak (in Syria). My focus has been studying domestic architecture and practice. For my dissertation (University of Michigan 2001) I developed a new technique for studying everyday life in households: micro-debris analysis. Below I outline the technique and discuss results from several sites.

Micro-Archaeology / Micro-Debris Analysis

Method

The rationale behind collecting and analyzing artifacts under 10mm in size is that smaller objects are more likely than large items to remain where they were dropped or lost. Accordingly, sediment samples are collected from primary contexts in order to analyze the count and weight distribution of micro-artifacts. Samples are also taken from secondary contexts and sterile sediments in order to provide a control against which the density of primary contexts can be measured.

Micro-artifacts are often the direct result of processes, i.e. the making of stone tools, the preparation of food, the place where pots were used and broken, and so give direct information about the activities which were carried out in those rooms rather than about where larger objects (such as complete tools and pots) were either stored or discarded.

Desirable features to sample include: surfaces (both interior room floors and exterior "empty areas"), streets, hearths, middens, and vessels containing sediments. Approximately 5 liters of soil are collected from each feature or floor surface. In the latter, this translates to about 50 x 50 cm, depending on the thickness of the floor. Most often, samples are chosen judgmentally from in front of thresholds, corners, and centers of rooms. If possible, separate samples are collected from the supra-floor to provide a comparison. When time and space permits, individual rooms are gridded and samples are randomly selected for analysis. These sediment samples are wet sieved and micro-artifacts collected from the heavy fraction. The types of artifacts recovered include sherds, bones (animal and human), lithics (debitage and tools), beads, clay sealings, pieces of plaster and burnt brick, bitumen, and metal fragments.

Why Size Matters

While architectural remains and associated features are increasingly well understood, the debris left by activities performed within them are usually disturbed and often discarded far from the loci of activity. Where the large finds may be scavenged, discarded, or curated in periods of abandonment, smaller debris is often swept into corners or trampled into the surface of a floor or courtyard in an ancient community. Schiffer (1983: 679) referred to this phenomenon as the McKellar Hypothesis: even if an activity area is periodically cleaned, smaller remains are more likely to become primary refuse, while larger items are removed in the process of cleaning (especially if they constitute a safety threat, such as stone tool debris). This premise is the rationale behind collecting small artifacts.

Previous Studies of Micro-debris

The study of micro-debris was first attempted in the early 20th-century with the detailed analysis Californian shell middens (Gifford 1916). He tested the proposition that small items may not be represented in larger sizes and thus must be collected separately. After a hiatus of several decades, further micro-debris studies were conducted on Native American sites in California (Cook and Treganza 1947, 1950). At these sites only micro-artifacts remained due to the poor preservation of macro-artifacts. Decades later, archaeologists and geologists returned to questioning the utility of small artifacts for identifying primary activity areas and remains of activities that would otherwise not be visible (Baker 1975; Lange and Rydberg 1972; Fehon and Scholtz 1978; Gifford 1978; Hassan 1978; Wilk and Schiffer 1979). Most of these early studies were experimental, testing the deposition and preservation of micro-ceramics, lithics, and faunal remains. Still others test the concordance between macro and micro-remains.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the earlier studies were refined and expanded upon (Fladmark 1982, Rosen 1986, Courty et al. 1989, Manzanilla and Barba 1990, Metcalfe and Heath 1990, Matthews 1992, Kemp 1994, Manzanilla 1996, Matthews et al.1997). These studies evaluated the methodological feasibility of micro-analysis and propose a variety of techniques for collecting and analyzing micro-debris. Methodologically, there were variations in the debris-size collected (ranging from .063 mm, 4 phi, to 30 mm, approximately —5 phi).

For an example of a micro-archaeological study of debris within an Early Bronze Age Household, click here.