Journal of Urban Archaeology 12 (2025)

This issue of Journal of Urban Archaeology combines an open call for papers with a special thematic section focused on the entanglement of political control and colonialism with the archaeology of urban sites in the Near East and Egypt during the late Ottoman and the Mandate periods. The articles in this special issue examine how earlier colonial and orientalist approaches informed and shaped archaeological fieldwork, and created persistent legacies in the study of ancient urban sites, through the use of specifi c case studies. Through this approach, these articles demonstrate how the critical re-examination of legacy data can structure nuanced narratives, and together, the authors point the way forwards for dismantling current paradigms around the urban archaeology of the region.

List of Illustrations

‘The House we Live in’
Rubina Raja and Søren M. Sindbæk

Recent Research in Nicomedia: New Reliefs and the Location of the Hippodrome Within the Urban Context
Tuna Şare Ağtürk

An Egyptian Villa with Animal Pens in New Kingdom Nubia: Reinterpreting Building H4 and Area H4W on Sai Island
Carl G. Elkins, Julia Budka, and Chloë Ward

Inventing Urban Public Space: Morphogenesis and Energized Crowding in Mohenjo-Daro
Kim Dovey and Michael E. Smith

Ephemeral Rituals and Urban Timescapes: Family Ties and Object Biography at the Asklepieia of Epidauros and Pergamon
Pim Schievink and Christina Williamson

Do Warmer, Wetter, and More Unpredictable Environments Matter? Differences in Institutional and Infrastructural Arrangements and Intergenerational Wealth Distributions between Premodern Cities in the Humid and Semiarid Neotropics
Vernon L. Scarborough and Christian Isendahl

Special Issue: Lost Cities and Legacy Data

Cities ‘Lost’ and ‘Found’: The Impact of Western Research on Ancient Sites in the Perception of their Urbanism
Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja

Shelving Urban Excavations: Revisiting Ottoman and Mandate Period Archives in Western Asia
Olympia Bobou, Filiz Tütüncü Çağlar, Miriam Kühn, Eleanor Q. Neil, and Rubina Raja

Lost Cities in the Near East: Reassembling Knowledge through Archival Research and Excavation Documentation
Olympia Bobou, Miriam Kühn, and Rubina Raja

Note sur l’urbanisme antique en Syrie durant la période du Mandat Français
Michel Al-Maqdissi

From Tadmor to Palmyra, 1923–1929: The (Re-)creation of an Ancient City
Olympia Bobou and Rubina Raja

From ‘Secondary’ City to Primary Focus: A Historiographical Approach to the Urbanity of Seleucia in Pieria
Michael Blömer, Olympia Bobou, Eleanor Q. Neil, and Rubina Raja

The Organization of Archaeological Fieldwork and Selective Publication of Findings as Appropriation of Knowledge: Observations on the 1931 Spring Campaign in Gerasa
Rubina Raja

Alexandria as an Observatory of the Difficulties of Ancient Urban History
Marie-Dominique Nenna