News Release

Expert on the ancient Near East to deliver
first Carolina Lecture in Archaeology

CHAPEL HILL – The inaugural Carolina Lecture in Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be delivered March 21 by Dr. Gil J. Stein of the University of Chicago.

The free public lecture, "Colonies without Colonialism? A Mesopotamian Trading Enclave at Hacinebi (Turkey) ca. 3700 B.C.," will be at 5 p.m. in Hyde Hall’s University Room.

A professor in Chicago’s near Eastern languages and civilizations department, Stein also directs the university’s Oriental Institute. The institute, which houses research projects and a museum, has undertaken projects in every part of the ancient Near East, including the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, Persia, parts of the Ottoman Empire and the lands of the Bible.

Stein’s lecture will focus on the ancient settlement site of Hacinebi (pronounced "Ha-jih-NEH-bee"), dating from about 4000-3100 B.C. Stein directed excavations of the site from 1992 to 1997.

The Sumerian civilization of southern Mesopotamia, where Hacinebi was located, is best known for development of the first cities and the invention of writing. Mesopotamia also founded the world’s earliest known colonial system.

The Mesopotamian city states that existed from about 3800-3100 B.C. established trading settlements along the Euphrates River and other key trade routes. This allowed trading settlements to gain access to resources including copper, lumber and semi-precious stones from the highlands of Turkey and Iran.

Although many of these colonies have been excavated, almost nothing is known about the relationship between the Mesopotamians and the people with whom they traded. Excavations at Hacinebi in the Euphrates River Valley provide a rare chance to study the effects of the Mesopotamian trading colonies on other cultures.

By comparing archaeological evidence from Mesopotamian and Anatolian quarters at Hacinebi, the organization of this ancient colonial system and the role of Mesopotamia in the development of Anatolian civilization, located in Asia Minor, can be reconstructed.

The lecture is sponsored by the Faculty Working Group on Early Mediterranean Societies, part of UNC’s Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, as well as the classics department, Research Laboratories of Archaeology and the archaeology program.

Stein earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in archaeology from Yale University in 1978 and a doctorate in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988. He has excavated and surveyed in Arizona, New Mexico, Syria and most recently in Turkey, where he has worked since 1981.

He has been a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a post-doctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution and a resident scholar at the School of American Research in Santa Fe. He also has received a Howard fellowship from Brown University. His work includes more than 40 journal articles, book chapters and reviews.

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Classics department contacts: Jeffrey Becker, (919) 962-7191 or jabecker@email.unc.edu; Donald Haggis, (919) 962-7640 or dchaggis@email.unc.edu
Archaeology department contact: Vincas Steponaitis, (919) 962-3846 or vps@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: L.J. Toler, (919) 962-8589