The River Divides? Imagined Borders and Practised Borderities in the Lower Sirwan River Valley

This paper explores two sites recently excavated by the Sirwan Regional Project (SRP)—Tepe Kalan (SRP018) and Kani Masi (SRP094)—located just 14 km apart on opposite sides of the lower Sirwan river in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and occupied simultaneously during the Middle Bronze Age I ( c. 2000–1850 bce ). The MB I was a lively period of political negotiation and cultural reconfiguration across the region, with these dynamics playing out in various social arenas, from rock reliefs to everyday eating and drinking activities. Detailed examination of the functional potentialities of pottery vessels from the two sites, set within an inter–regional context of connectivity, demonstrates alternative community networks and practices of cultural production. These material insights challenge us to reconceptualize our traditional approaches to borders and their state–driven political and cultural materializations and narratives. We emphasize here the perspective of mobile borders and emergent borderities, which allow us to move towards careful articulations of localized processes, community encounters and temporalities beyond the state.