How Wide is the Near East? Some Reflections on the Limits of “Near Eastern Archaeology”

The paper considers how the traditional focus of Near Eastern Archaeology, which was centred on Mesopotamia and the surrounding areas of Syro-Palestine, Anatolia and Iran, has been challenged, in several ways and for several reasons, by recent development of the discipline, whose geographical limits have thus become increasingly vague. Examples are given of how recent field activities, by revealing deep and in some cases unsuspected connections with areas which are traditionally the object of different disciplines and have developed a different scholarly tradition, encourage a renewed interest on long-distance circulation and diffusion of raw materials, artefacts and ideas, but at the same time require a deep re-adjustment of our theoretical frameworks and even of our scientific background. Special attention is devoted to the new perspectives about interconnections within the northern portion of the Near East and between this and other cultural macroareas (Central Asia, the Aegean, Southwestern Europe and the Eurasian steppes) opened by field research in the highlands of the Southern Caucasus and Northern Turkey in the course of the last decades.