Buying local or ancient outsourcing? Locating production of prismatic obsidian blades in Bronze-Age Northern Mesopotamia

It is widely held that crafting prismatic chert and obsidian blades was extremely specialised in the Bronze-Age Near East. The prevalent narrative holds that there were just a few dedicated workshops in Anatolia's Upper Euphrates Valley, from which blade segments were exported to Northern Mesopotamia. Due to the challenges of chert sourcing, obsidian has been incorporated into the narrative. Recently, Tell Mozan was added to the proponents' list of Mesopotamian sites with blades imported from Anatolian workshops. Two issues are addressed in this paper. First, does archaeological evidence regarding the spatial organisation of blade production support an interpretation that incomplete reduction sequences imply off-site production? It is shown here that, at known workshop sites, the reduction sequence occurs only in small portions of large urban centres, and even there certain reduction products are under-represented. Second, do obsidians at Tell Mozan and other sites originate from sources near the proposed blade workshops? Highly diverse obsidians at Tell Mozan are inconsistent with a reliance on Anatolian workshops, and a reassessment of prior sourcing studies reveals a regional “sourcescape” more variable than generally thought. The result is a very different picture of lithic craft specialisation in Northern Mesopotamia: diverse obsidian cores and preforms reaching the cities' specialists involved in household production principally for the local market.