Beyond the Garden of Eden – Competition and Early Warfare in Northern Syria (4500–3000 B.C.)

Excerpt from the article

War is the father of all things. Mixed emotions come to mind when hearing this expression, and the world of archaeology offers no exception to that. The horrors of warfare are all too close to many of us in Europe, where scars of World War II still haunt us. Archaeologists, on the other hand, cannot escape a certain amount of gratefulness, even pleasure, when excavating a context that was destroyed by violence. Artifacts left in their functional context, covered up by massive amounts of debris, unimportant to looters or marauding troops often provide priceless clues to us in our quest to understand ancient, often silent, worlds. Our relationship with warfare is complex, sometimes even schizophrenic. The world of Near Eastern archaeology is everything but an exception to this rule.