This project is about the entanglements between human beings, the material world and

technology in Mesopotamia, one of the best-documented, yet understudied scientific

civilizations of the ancient world. While traditional inquiries into how people in this society

interacted with and conceptualized their surroundings relied on Cartesian frameworks that

presumed a rigid dichotomy between human beings and nature, recent scholarship has

exposed the inadequacy this interpretive lens. And yet, fundamental questions about the

non-dualistic “natureculture” of Mesopotamia have hardly been explored: how was the

whole of the biological and non-biological world conceptualized? How did technologies,

tools and theoretical models play a role in the production of knowledge about this world?

What ideas did people have about sustainability, innovation and ingenuity when it came to

how they interacted with the environment? AMW will answer these questions by

reconstructing and analysing the fragmentary philological, archaeological, archaeometric

and ethnographic data relating to minerals and flora (ca. 2000-330 BCE).