true nonetheless that Frankfort, more than any of his peers or successors, attempted to break down the barriers between different classes of evidence so as to recreate Mesopotamian culture in the round. He is not alone in having failed entirely to bring all of these aspects together in one seamless narrative.

The intellectual history of Mesopotamian archaeology since World War II has been sporadic and largely reactive to challenges from other arenas, notably the New Archaeology, processual and postprocessual archaeology, and the annales school of historiography. By and large, the vigorous debates that have taken place in archaeological theory over the past forty years have received little direct input from Mesopotamian (or other Near Eastern) research, and figures like Childe and Frankfort, who engaged actively with the major intellectual currents of their time, do not come easily to mind. As in Syro-Palestinian archaeology (but unlike in Egyptology) the bifurcation of Mesopotamian archaeology from the text-based study of history and culture continues to play a significant role in defining the lines of current research. Interest in the broader social and historical dynamics of Mesopotamia still looks more to textual than to archaeological data for its primary validation, thereby defusing the motivation for the higher level theory that animates prehistoric studies elsewhere. Advances in archaeological theory and practice have tended to be correspondingly more methodological and technical. It remains a matter of disagreement among archaeologists to what extent this lack of theory is an intellectual failing or a welcome reflection of Mesopotamia’s greater variety and abundance of direct evidence of cultural motivation and behavior.

The influence of processual theory has been most apparent in the emphasis, from the 1970s, on defining sociopolitical processes, notably the rise of social complexity and early state development in the Uruk period. This work was greatly facilitated by the extensive surveys of settlement patterns in the Mesopotamian alluvium by Robert McCormick Adams and others in the 1960s and 1970s. The dynamics of core/periphery relations—especially relevant to resource-poor Mesopotamia—have become much more nuanced, especially between the cities of southern and northern Mesopotamia. As everywhere, diffusionism is strongly out of favor, with northern Mesopotamia emerging as a primary center of independent innovation. More sophisticated, model-oriented discussions of the nature of trade and other forms of economic and non-economic exchange have drawn from a variety of theoretical positions, including Marxism and processual theory. Also owing something to these trends has been the greater appreciation of the technological and social functionality of many classes of artifact (seals and sealings, pottery, figurines, elite status markers, and texts qua objects), all generating a greater interest in domestic archaeological contexts. Within both newer and older theoretical positions may be seen the expanding utilization of scientific analytical tools, especially in the retrieval and interpretation of biological remains, in dating, and in the reconstruction of technologies of metallurgy, ceramics, glass-making, etc. In cuneiform studies the use and abuse of “historical” sources has been much discussed in the past twenty years, turning the focus onto the contextual understanding of texts as instruments of contemporary ideology and propaganda. Here archaeology has been ahead of the trend in its longstanding appreciation of the propagandistic nature of public art.

Anthropology has featured intermittently in Mesopotamian archaeology as a basis for comparative interpretation, especially in reconstructions of a (semi-) nomadic lifstyle among communities of the Zagros frontier and in work on prehistoric sites. In investigations of historical periods its application has been scarcer, restricted largely to categories like pottery that bridge the prehistoric/historic divide.

The art-historical analysis of Mesopotamian culture is less developed than in the classical world or Egyptology for reasons both internal and external to the subject. Among external factors is the fact that relatively few Mesopotamian archaeologists have a strong background in the principles and methodology of art history. Exceptions (notably H. Frankfort, P. Amiet and E. Porada) have had a disproportionate