Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 68 (2022) 101458 Available online 22 September 2022 0278-4165/© 2022 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Multi-centric, Marsh-based Urbanism at the early Mesopotamian city of Lagash (Tell al-Hiba, Iraq) Emily Hammer University of Pennsylvania, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Department & Price Lab for the Digital Humanities, Williams Hall, 255 S 36 th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Mesopotamia Ancient city plan Early urbanism Landscape archaeology Remote sensing Archaeological survey ABSTRACT Leveraging a suite of remote sensing technologies deployed over large areas, this paper presents results that challenge long-held ideas about the origin and development of the world’s oldest urban centers, in southern Iraq. The standard model of third millennium BCE Mesopotamian cities presents them as nuclear, compact settlements set within an irrigated agricultural hinterland, expanding continuously from a monumental religious complex. This reconstruction holds enormous infuence in the comparative global study of early urbanism. UAV photos and magnetic gradiometry data captured at Lagash (Tell al-Hiba) show dense architecture and related paleo- environmental features over c. 300 ha, revealing a city that does not conform to the standard model. Early Dynastic Lagash (2900–2350 BCE) was composed of spatially discrete sectors bounded by multiple surrounding walls and/or watercourses and separated by open spaces. The evidence is suggestive of a marshy or watery local environment, and the city sectors may have originated as marsh islands. The discontinuous, walled nature of inhabited areas would have had social and logistical ramifcations for city inhabitants. A number of contem- porary sites are characterized by multiple archaeological mounds, suggesting that early southern Mesopotamian cities may have frequently been spatially multi-centric. 1. Introduction The world’s earliest cities developed in the fourth-third millennia BCE between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq (Sumer, southern Mesopotamia) (Algaze, 2008; Pollock, 1999; Van de Mieroop, 1997). Founded along river channels, already-large settlements grew in the third millennium BCE Early Dynastic period (c. 2900–2350 BCE) to cover dozens to hundreds of hectares and incorporated monumental temples, residential areas, canals, and harbors. For decades scholars have described southern Mesopotamian cities as nuclear, compact, hi- erarchical settlements with a singular city wall (typically oval-shaped) and set within an irrigated agricultural hinterland, expanding out- wards in a continuous fashion from a central religious complex. The identifcation of these characteristics as fundamental traits of early Mesopotamian city form traces back to Childe’s (1936, 1942) defnition of the “Urban Revolution”, and they have remained central to widely- cited comparative discussions (e.g., Trigger, 2003: 120-131; Van de Mieroop, 1997: 63-97). Important aspects of this standard model of third millennium southern Mesopotamian urban form have never been verifed, however. Decades of confict have limited feldwork in southern Iraq and so archaeological knowledge has remained largely constrained to data collected by excavations in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. Many southern Mesopotamian cities were continuously inhabited for thou- sands of years, resulting in meters of accumulated cultural strata and therefore excavators could only expose small windows relevant to the period of initial urban growth. Further, excavations focused over- whelmingly on temples and palaces, encouraging a biased, elite- centered view of city life. The few studies of more extensive residen- tial spaces concern neighborhoods of the second millennium BCE (Stone, 1987; Stone and Zimansky, 2004; Woolley and Mallowan, 1976), when Mesopotamian communities had already been urban for more than a millennium. With little empirical basis for a broader understanding of early city form, synthetic discussions of Mesopotamian urbanism amalgamate details from various periods, presenting an idealized pic- ture of “the Mesopotamian city” that may not be accurate for any one period, let alone the fourth-third millennia BCE period during which cities were originally founded and greatly expanded. A number of archaeologists have put forward alternative hypotheses concerning early southern Mesopotamian cities’ origins, development, and layout, but these models have remained fundamentally speculative because spatially extensive and ground-truthed archaeological data do E-mail address: ehammer@sas.upenn.edu. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Anthropological Archaeology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2022.101458 Received 12 April 2022; Received in revised form 14 July 2022;