Review: R. Pierobon Benoit, C. Coppini, R. Palermo and R. Pappalardo (eds.), Exploring ‘Dark Ages’: Archaeological Markers of Transition in the Near East from the Bronze Age to the Early Islamic Period, Studia Chaburensia 10, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2022, 160 pp., illustrations (many in colour). Paperback. ISBN 978-3-447-11755-5/ISSN 1869-845X

This work has been published by Harrassowitz as Studia Chaburensia 10, an interdisciplinary academic series encompassing geographically northern Syria and Mesopotamia and devoted to the study of regional as well as supra-regional themes of macro- and micro-history, material culture, environment, settlement dynamics, socio-economy, administra- tion etc. It contains seven chapters and the contributions gathered here are based on papers presented to a workshop organised by Costanza Coppini, Rocco Palermo and Raffaella Pappalardo, the editors, at the 11th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE), held in Munich in April 2018. In the Introduction (pp. 1–13), the editors R. Pierobon Benoit, C. Coppini, R. Palermo and R. Pappalardo outlines how to define the evolution, through ‘Dark Age’ periods, of societal systems from rural to urban and vice versa, and contextually from the transitional phase that led to the establishment of many urban centres in Upper Mesopotamia between the Middle and Late Bronze period, to the tangible ruralisation and subsequent demographic crisis of the periods that followed the collapse of the Assyrian empire.