Era of the Living Dead: Memory, Sacrifice and the “Royal” Tombs at Umm el-Marra, Syria

Thursday, October 17
James West Alumni Center, Founders Room
Reception at 6:00 pm
Lecture at 7:00 pm

Excavations at Tell Umm el-Marra (perhaps ancient Tuba) in northern Syria revealed a large Early Bronze Age elite mortuary complex raised up in the center of the community. In this complex, tombs with human remains and objects of gold, silver, and lapis lazuli were accompanied by the burials of high-prestige animals (donkey x wild ass hybrids, known as kungas).  Unique in the archaeology of third-millennium BC Syria, the Umm el-Marra necropolis allows for the reconstruction of elite funerary practices in detail and illuminates the importance of ancestor veneration, social memory, and animal agency in the development of Syria’s first urban civilization.

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Glenn M. Schwartz is Whiting Professor of Archaeology, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Johns Hopkins University.  He is a Near Eastern archaeologist who has directed excavations in Syria and Iraq and conducts research on the emergence and early trajectory of complex societies.  Schwartz received his PhD from Yale University in 1982.

Schwartz’s field project at Tell Umm el-Marra, western Syria, included a focus on an elite necropolis from the Early Bronze Age with well-preserved tombs and evidence of ritual and sacrificial installations.  His previous excavation project was based at Tell al-Raqa’i in northeastern Syria, investigating the character of a small village in the period of urban formation. Schwartz’s most recent fieldwork project has been based at the second-millennium BC urban Bronze Age site of Kurd Qaburstan south of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Among his publications are The Archaeology of Syria: From Complex Hunter-Gatherers to Urban Societies, ca. 16,000-300 BC (Cambridge University Press, 2003), coauthored with Peter Akkermans, Rural Archaeology in Early Urban Northern Mesopotamia: Excavations at Tell al-Raqa’i (Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2015), and After Collapse: The Regeneration of Complex Societies(University of Arizona Press, 2006), coedited with John Nichols.