About

Melissa S. Rosenzweig is an Associate Professor of Instruction in Anthropology and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University. She is an anthropological archaeologist specializing in environmental archaeology of the ancient Near East, with regional expertise in northern Mesopotamia and the Levant. Her research incorporates archaeobotany and focuses on human-environment interactions, particularly through her work on the ancient Mesopotamian empire of Neo-Assyria (ca. 900 – 600 BCE). Her scholarly work emphasizes the relationships of power and inequality embedded in agrarian lifeways, analyzing how agricultural practices influence political subjectivities, imperial ideologies, colonial acts, and subaltern resistance through a political ecology framework. Rosenzweig received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2014 and was an NEH fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research for 2014-15. She has held academic positions at Miami University in Ohio and has been involved in research funded by prominent institutions such as the National Science Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, the American Schools of Oriental Research, the National Geographic Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her teaching portfolio includes courses on Archaeological Theory and Method, Archaeology of Power, Old World Archaeology, Political Ecology, and Environmental Justice and Environmental Anthropology.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• Sociology
• History
• Geography
• Agroforestry
• Art
• Biology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Early archaeological evidence of wheat and cotton from medieval Ile-Ife, Nigeria

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024 · 3 citations

  • Archaeology
  • Geography
  • Agroforestry

  sp.) recovered from late 12th- to early 13th-century CE contexts suggest earlier and more widespread use than wheat. Cotton may have been cultivated and manufactured into cloth locally. The quick adoption of these exotic crops illustrates the active negotiation of prestige through culinary and adornment practices, as well as a high degree of agricultural experimentation.

  PublisherDOI

• Living at the Gate:

  Archaeopress Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Confronting the Present: Archaeology in 2019

  American Anthropologist · 2020 · 26 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Archaeology
  • History

  ABSTRACT Postmodernity has a distinctly pre‐apocalyptic feel to it, and this feeling has seeped into archaeology. A review of the scholarship from 2019 attests that archaeologists are having to reckon with present‐day conditions and phenomena as they structure their research, delineate the material world, and affirm archaeology's relevance. Furthermore, these concerns have moved from the realm of the rarely spoken and come to constitute a critical conversation in the field. In a number of respects, the contours of archaeology now hinge upon the discipline's responses to developments in real time, including: How can archaeological knowledge production escape the logistical and epistemological bounds of late capitalism and its failures? Can archaeology contribute to future‐building, and what would that look like? Does archaeology have to be scholar‐activism to achieve the goal of making the past matter (to whom) (for what)? [ archaeology, contemporary archaeology, future archaeology, current issues ]

  PublisherDOI

• Beating Swords into Plowshares: The Role of Agricultural Colonization in Imperial Histories

  The 84th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology · 2019-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• <i>Imperial Peripheries in the Neo-Assyrian Period</i>. Edited by Craig W. Tyson and Virginia R. Herrmann. Louisville, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2018. Pp. xxii+ 297 + 49 figs. $75.00 (cloth).

  Journal of Near Eastern Studies · 2019-10-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Archaeologies of empire and environment

  Journal of Anthropological Archaeology · 2018-09-07 · 30 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 2 Assessing the Politics of Neo‐Assyrian Agriculture

  Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association · 2018-07-01 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT In this paper, political ecology informs a study of agriculture under the Neo‐Assyrian empire. Rather than examining cultivation solely as an economy of subsistence practices, this work considers agrarian laborers, activities, and resources as participants in wider political processes of empire‐building. Both material and discursive manipulations of agriculture are discussed in order to demonstrate the ways in which rulers of Neo‐Assyria instituted agricultural colonization in Upper Mesopotamia for political gain. An archaeobotanical case study from the provincial capital of Tušhan is then presented to provide a closer look at the impact of these agro‐politics on the people and lands in the provinces of the empire. Plant use studies from Tušhan capture the flow of power through agricultural practice, emphasize the Neo‐Assyrian monarchy's rhetorical use of agriculture in strategies of imperialism, and, significantly, reveal the shortcomings of the empire's agrarian program.

  PublisherDOI

• Assyrian Provincial Life:

  Proceedings of the 9th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East · 2016-06-01 · 1 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Cultivating subjects in the Neo-Assyrian empire

  Journal of Social Archaeology · 2016-10-01 · 46 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article, which centers upon the Neo-Assyrian empire of the early first millennium BCE, presents agriculture as a field of political intervention and transformation in the creation of imperial subjectivities. As part of the expansion process into territories of Upper Mesopotamia, Neo-Assyrian rulers (ca. 900–600 BCE) relied on settled agriculture to produce and promote imperial subjects bound to the authorities for whom they tilled and toiled. However, archaeobotanical data from Tušhan, a provincial capital of the empire, reveals that people under Neo-Assyria’s control did not fully conform to the idealized agrarian lifeways construed by officials to uphold Assyrian power and dictate subject conduct. Evidence for semi-nomadic pastoralism at Tušhan exposes the slippage between ideal agrarian subject and actual agrarian practice in the Neo-Assyrian empire, wherein lies the contestation over politically oriented subjectivities and their instantiation through land-use.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘Ordering the chaotic periphery’: the environmental impact of the Assyrian empire on its provinces (The provincial archaeology of the Assyrian empire)

  Apollo (University of Cambridge) · 2016-01-01

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Tokens and tablets: administrative practice on the edge of the empire -the evidence from Ziyaret Tepe (Tuhan) 41 Willis Monroe Chapter 5 'Ordering the chaotic periphery': the environmental impact of the Assyrian empire on its provinces 49 Melissa Rosenzweig Chapter 6 Neo-Assyrian pebble mosaics in their architectural context 59 Guy Bunnens Chapter 7 The social value and semiotic meaning of Neo-Assyrian Palace Ware 71 Alice Hunt Chapter 8 Neo-Assyrian building-related operations in the provinces and beyond according to the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and state archives: physics of an imperial ideology 79 Johanna Tudeau Chapter 9 Connecting seals -seals connecting: the 'FSV' group of Iron Age knobbed stamp-seals 85 Dirk Wicke Part III Core Provinces Chapter 10 The Eski Mosul region in the Late Assyrian period 97 John Curtis Chapter 11 The Excavations of the College of Archaeology at Kuyunjik (ancient Nineveh) Ali Aljuboori Chapter 12 The Tell Baqrta Project in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq Konstantinos Kopanias, Claudia Beuger, John MacGinnis, Jason Ur Chapter 13 A feast for the ears: Neo-Assyrian royal architecture and acoustics at Khorsabad (ancient Dur-arrukin) Augusta McMahon Chapter 14 The Land of Nineveh Archaeological Project.Assyrian settlement in the Nineveh hinterland: a view from the centre Daniele Morandi Bonacossi Chapter 15 Qasr Shemamok (ancient Kilizu), a provincial capital east of the Tigris: recent excavations and new perspectives Olivier Rouault Chapter 16 The rural landscape of the Assyrian heartland: recent results from Arbail and Kilizu provinces Jason Ur and James Osborne vi

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Laurent Dissard

  Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour

  3 shared

• Timothy Matney

  2 shared

• Gérard Chouin

  2 shared

• Tina L. Greenfield

  University of Manitoba

  2 shared

• Kemalettin Köroǧlu

  1 shared

• Amanda L. Logan

  Northwestern University

  1 shared

• Shannon Lally

  Northwestern University

  1 shared

• Alemseged Beldados

  University of North Carolina Wilmington

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• NEH fellow at the Albright Institute of Archaeological Resea…
• funded by the National Science Foundation
• funded by the American Research Institute in Turkey
• funded by the American Schools of Oriental Research
• funded by the National Geographic Society