Rediscovering the Heartland of Cities. South Mesopotamian Early States in Their Setting through New Field Research

The study of Mesopotamian early urbanism has its roots in Robert McCormick Adams’s pioneering research of the 1960s and 1970s. From the holistic approach applied during his long academic career derived the historical narratives that still represent the starting point for many recent reappraisals. Adams’s surveys in southern Mesopotamia were carried out according to standards and scopes that were unparalleled in their time. The large-scale perspective applied to different regions of central and southern Iraq during over thirty years of fieldwork resulted in seminal works like The Land behind Baghdad (1965), The Uruk Countryside (1972) and Heartland of Cities (1981).