Post-Akkadian
The only post-Akkadian abandonment structure, Leilan period IIc, with a ceramic assemblage also documented at a few other Khabur Plains sites, was a four-room courtyard-centered house built upon the abandoned Akkadian Administrative Building (Fig. 7). Radio- carbon analyses indicate that this was occupied for perhaps three to five decades (Weiss et al. 2012). Major site-size reductions are also documented for this brief period at Brak (50%), Mozan (84%), Chagar Bazar (84%), and across the Leilan Region Survey (87%)(Weiss 2013; Arrivabeni 2012).
Fig. 7 L02, 44T16, Pd. IIc 4-room rebuild.
Seven Generations since the Fall of Akkad
The short-lived post-Akkadian period was followed by the near total abandonment of the Khabur Plains for the next two hundred years. As previously documented epigraphically and now archaeologically, only Mozan/Urkeš was occupied on the Khabur Plains during this period (Weiss et al. 1993; Pfälzner/Wissing 2004; Orsi 2011). Abandonment at Leilan and across dry-farming west Asia, at approximately 4.2 ka BP/2200 BC was one adaptive response to the global, ca. 300-year, abrupt aridification and cooling event known from marine, lake, glacial, and speleothem paleoclimate proxy records (Cullenetal 2000; Staubwasser/Weiss 2006; Weiss 2013). These proxies are distributed densely from Spain to Greece, Albania, Turkey, and Iran, with particularly high resolution in Israel, Syria, and Turkey, and document the yet-unexplained dislocation or weakening of the north Atlantic cyclogenesis that produces the Mediterranean westerlies, the precipitation delivery system for all of west Asia. Here precipitation abruptly declined, 30 – 50% in some estimates, only to return abruptly at about 1900 BC (Frumkin 2009). This two-stage Khabur Plains abandonment, Šamšī- Adad’s “…seven generations since the Fall of Akkad,” (Grayson 1987: 53) and synchronous abandonments across northern Mesopotamia and western Syria, was accompanied by nomadization and habitat-tracking to the riparian, paludal, and karstic-spring refugia in western Syria, the middle Euphrates, and southern Iraq, where sedentary settlements multiplied in size and number (Weiss 2013).