offered (igure 1). These polities were also short-lived; around 1700 BC, thousands of villages and cities were again abandoned, presumably representing a massive change in economic and social organization. When considering Bronze Age settlement patterns, this 500 year period stands out as a clear anomaly. The number of settlements, the area of settled hectarage and the settlement hierarchy – the relationship between vil- lages, towns and cities – all differ dramatically from the patterns that typify Northern Mesopotamia at ear- lier and later periods (e.g. the mid-late third millen- nium and the later second millennium). Nowhere can we see this more clearly than in the settlement patterns documented in the Leilan Regional Survey. It seems likely that these changes in settlement pat- terns index a transformation in economic, political and social processes in Northern Mesopotamia generally, and in the Leilan region in particular. Yet archaeologi- cal approaches to understanding the regeneration of political complexity in the early second millennium BC have emphasized continuity rather than disjunc- tion. 2 Theories of regeneration have fallen into two main categories: 1) template regeneration – arguing that the re-establishment of political power followed earlier set patterns 3 – or 2) rural resiliency – arguing that collapse only affected urban centers and that the conservative strategies of rural pastoralists and farm- ers created conditions that allowed for the regeneration of such centers. 4 Advocates of template regeneration depict Mesopo- tamian civilization as essentially cyclical, alternating between phases of centralization and regionalization (the latter is sometimes interpreted as collapse). 5 In this hypothesis, the basic template for political cen- tralization emerged during the late third millennium (with the Akkadian empire) or possibly even the fourth millennium (in the form of an Uruk empire), and was periodically reactivated. 6 Although recognizing con- tinuity in the long urban history of the Middle East is important, I would argue that it is time for us to focus on diversity. Too much emphasis on the assumed “unity” of Mesopotamian civilization can result in situ- ations where institutions like “the state,” “kingship,” or 2 Schwartz – Nichols 2006. 3 For this terminology see Bronson 2006, for studies of tem- plate regeneration in Mesopotamia see Nichols – Weber 2006, Yoffee 1988. 4 Adams 1978, Cooper 2006a, Cooper 2006b. 5 Yoffee 1988. 6 Marcus 1998, Nichols – Weber 2006. Abstract From 2200-1900 BC, Northern Mesopotamia experi- enced depopulation and a loss of political complex- ity. Understanding the resettlement of this region – the recovery of complex societies following collapse – has emerged as a major research question in Near Eastern archaeology. Recent studies have employed two mod- els of political regeneration: 1) “template regenera- tion,” whereby the renewed society follows the same pattern that a society in the same area had before the collapse and 2) “rural resiliency,” whereby the col- lapse of urban settlements was epiphenomenal and a resilient rural and tribal base allowed for settlement continuity and the regeneration of urban society. This article proposes a different model and argues that this resettlement involved the creation of a new type of polity, the tribal kingdom, which employed novel political, economic and cultural strategies. Tribal kingdoms were characterized by the rise of tribal confederacies, changing mobility patterns, changes in social structure, and new economic systems that used the steppe in different ways, all of which trans- formed settlements of all sizes as well as the relation- ships between them. Although these tribal kingdoms sought to establish their hegemony (in a Gramscian sense) partly by appealing to historical precedents, particularly the Akkadian Empire, they did not simply revive third millennium political practices. Similarly, although continuity is evident in some centers, survey and excavation data reveal that the overall settlement systems in Northern Mesopotamia were transformed between the third and second millennia. As a result, this article emphasizes the importance of discontinu- ity in the archaeological and historical record, in con- trast to the usual emphasis on continuity, maintenance and the longue durée in complex societies following their emergence. 1 Introduction At approximately 2200 BC, settlements across North- ern Mesopotamia were suddenly abandoned. 1 For the next three centuries, only a few permanent, agricultural settlements marked these previously crowded plains. In the early second millennium BC, settlers returned to this region, creating new polities in response to the new opportunities and constraints that the abandonment 1 Weiss 2000, Ristvet – Weiss 2005, Courty et al. 1993. Resettling Apum: Tribalism and Tribal States in the Tell Leilan Region, Syria Lauren Ristvet