Excavations at Tell al-Raqā'i: A Small Rural Site of Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia

Abstract

The site of Tell al-Raqā'i in the middle Ḫabur valley is the focal point of an excavation project investigating the social and economic organization of a small rural community during the emergence of urban systems in northern Mesopotamia in the mid-third-millennium B. C. Three seasons of excavation, exposing the majority of the two latest third-millennium occupation levels, have supplied evidence of an architecturally diverse community engaged in specialized production activities; these results, together with the discovery of large-scale grain storage complexes near Raqā'i, indicate the presence of centers of collection, storage, processing, and distribution of agricultural products in the middle Ḫabur. The probable association of the middle Ḫabur specialized sites with newly emergent large centers outside the valley suggests a close integration of urban and rural economies in the region in the mid-third millennium.