Archaeologists interested in primary and secondary state formation have often focused their research on inter-regional exchange and cross-cultural interaction. The organization of exchange in the Uruk expansion - the world's first colonial trading system - was examined in a collaborative project of archaeologists and geochemists to determine sources of ancient bitumen (natural petroleum tar) artifacts from an early Mesopotamian trading colony in southeastern Turkey. Sixty-eight bitumen samples from the site of Hacinebi were compared with samples from other contemporaneous sites and source areas in Greater Mesopotamia. Stable carbon isotope and molecular organic geochemical analyses of these bitumen artifacts and bitumen source material were used to : 1) geographically source the artifacts, 2) identify the different regions involved in trade, and 3) identify diachronic changes in the organization of the trading network. Preliminary results suggest bitumen came from multiple, culturally and politically distinct areas of Mesopotamia to the region of Hacinebi Tepe, where Local Anatolian exchange networks were already in place. Segregation of bitumen sources at Hacinebi according to cultural context supports the model of a high degree of Mesopotamian economic autonomy at this trading colony. The integration of geochemical and archaeological methods provided us with a perspective on trade and inter- regional interactions that would have been impossible to gain with classic archaeological techniques alone.
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Schwartz et al. (1999) studied this question.
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