Thuesen Ingolf (ed.). Proceedings of the 2nd International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East: 22-26 May, 2000, Copenhagen. Vol. 1. The environment, images of gods and humans, the Tell, excavations reports and summaries, varia (chronology, technology, artifacts)

Bologna: Department of History and Cultures, University of Bologna / Eisenbrauns Bologna, 2016. — xiii, 859 p. — (ICAANE; 2.1)
The proceedings are structured according to the main themes of the congress. The themes were chosen not only because of their scientific importance, but also to show and strengthen the position of Near Eastern Archaeology within our contemporary society. The first theme (Section I), the Environment, concerns the natural setting for human activities in the ancient Near East. That is one of the major factors of human adaptation and becomes crucial when humans, through over exploitation of resources, shift the natural equilibrium. The understanding of the impact of humans upon nature is still a basic challenge to any society at the beginning of the 3rd millennium A.D. The second theme (Section II) addresses one of the traditional strong dimensions of Near Eastern Archaeology, namely the art historical aspect. The title, the Images of Gods and Humans, covers a set of contributions which describe and analyze the way the people of the past saw themselves and their gods. The third theme (Section III), the Tell, concerns our field work and the nature of one of the most prominent and typical monuments of the Near East. The theme as such deals with our mental and physical conceptualization of tells, which determines the strategies and methods we choose for achieving information on the past. The fourth main theme, Islamic Archaeology, was introduced in the Copenhagen ICAANE, as the Carsten Niebuhr Institute was in the process of building a new branch of the discipline dealing with the material culture and art of the Islamic periods. Although the theme is chronologically a bit out of focus, most field project dealing with Bronze or Iron Ages are likely to be confronted with remains from more recent and Islamic periods. It is our duty to offer the same attention to those remains as to the remains we originally targeted on. Not least due to the efforts of Alan Walmsley, the Islamic archaeology session became a very substantial part of the 2ICAANE. In the proceedings, the Islamic papers are placed in the second volume (Sections VI and VII). The ICAANE is also a forum for presenting excavation reports and summaries, and these are published in a separate Section IV. A number of papers without a clear affinity to the main themes dealing, for instance, with chronology, technology etc. are placed in Section V.