4. Interactions and New Directions in Near Eastern Archaeology. Volume 3

Interactions and New Directions in Near Eastern Archaeology is the third volume of the Proceedings of the 5th Broadening Horizons International Conference that was held at the University of Udine from 5th to 8th June 2017. Broadening Horizons aims to be an international platform for postgraduate students and early-career researchers in the wide Near Eastern archaeology field. The main topic of the conference Civilizations in Contact served to emphasize the importance of cross-cultural interactions in the Near East over time. In particular, the present volume is devoted to the papers from Session 7, “Civilizations in contact: current research and new approaches in Mediterranean and Near Eastern Archaeology”, and Session 6, “Marine connections: the Gulf and the interactions between the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, the Iranian world and beyond”. The volume contains 24 peer-reviewed papers divided into two parts, introduced by the two key-lectures which were given by Elena Rova and Maurizio Cattani. These proceedings give a vivid picture of the exchanges and interactions that occurred during the presentation and debate of specialist papers in Udine at the conference. The diversity in terms of geographical environments, historical periods, and topics in Near Eastern archaeology stands out among the contributions published here. This collection of papers by a new generation of young scholars offers fresh and novel approaches to complex archaeological topics.

Costanza Coppini is a White-Levy fellow at the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology at the Freie Universität Berlin, leading a project about the Middle and Late Bronze Age pottery and settlements in Northern Mesopotamia. She is a member of the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP), where she is in charge of the study and publication of second millennium pottery and takes part in the excavation at Gir-e Gomel (KIGAP). Her primary research field concerns the archaeology of the ancient Near East with a specialization in second millennium BC pottery and settlements. In relation to this topic she is involved in the study and publication of the pottery from the excavations at Tell Barri (Missione Archeologica Italiana a Tell Barri, Siria) and Tell Fekheriye (Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology, Freie Universität Berlin). She currently collaborates with other archaeological projects in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and has been involved in excavation projects in Italy and Syria. Besides these she participates in projects dealing with cultural heritage preservation.

Francesca Simi is a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Oxford. She works for the Endangered Archaeology in Middle East and North Africa project (EAMENA) at Oxford and is a senior member of the Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project (LoNAP). Her primary research field lies in the archaeology of the ancient Near East with a specialization in landscape archaeology. Her interests focus on the reconstruction of long-term population and land-use dynamics in Upper Mesopotamia by means of field survey, remote sensing techniques and GIS methods. She has been involved in several survey and excavation projects in Italy, Syria, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq. In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq – KRG, she directed the Tell Gomel Archaeological Survey (TGAS).