For the past twenty years, the Khabur Plains of northeast Syria have been a testing ground
for the Akkadian collapse c. 2200 BC and remnant post-Akkadian occupations. On May
2, 2012, a workshop for the presentation and discussion of the latest archaeological data
was convened in Warsaw, at the 8th International Congress for the Archaeology of the
Ancient Near East. The fifteen research papers from that conference present the analyses
and perspectives from eight excavated sites, Arbid, Barri, Chagar Bazar, Brak, Mohammed
Diyab, Leilan, Mozan, and Hamoukar, and two regional surveys. The new data include
the Tell Leilan high-resolution radiocarbon chronology for the Akkadian collapse, an
Akkadian palace built within the shell of a destroyed pre-Akkadian palace, The Unfinished
Buildings at Tell Leilan and Tell Mohammed Diyab, the terminal occupations at
Tell Brak, Chagar Bazar, Hamoukar, Arbid, Mohammed Diyab and Leilan, quantified
regional settlement distributions across the Akkadian collapse, measured paleobotanical
data for imperial Akkadian and remnant post-Akkadian agriculture, and documentation
for the collapse of the imperial Akkadian administration.