Trade and interaction during the era of the Uruk expansion: Recent insights from archaeometric analyses

The papers in this special issue apply archaeometric methods to one of the perplexing problems of prehistory: the spread of material culture out of Lower Mesopotamia into the surrounding plains and highlands ca. 3500-3100 BCE. Although archaeologists debate the cultural and historical processes underlying this spread, one influential model, Algaze's Uruk Expansion hypothesis, suggests that the widespread appearance of Uruk and Uruk-related material culture represents both movements of people and the extensive exchange of goods throughout greater Mesopotamia and into neighboring regions in Anatolia and Iran. Here we utilize robust methods of provenance determination, including trace-element and isotopic characterization, to examine the possible movement of basic commodities such as pottery, bitumen, and sealed containers among key Uruk and contemporaneous Iranian Proto-Elamite sites. As a group these papers provide significant new data regarding the types of interactions and contacts that did - and did not - take place in the Late Uruk and Proto-Elamite world.