Urban Morphology and Urban Syntax at Tell el-Dabʿa

The study of houses and households is a familiar subject within Near Eastern and Egyptian archaeology. Occasionally, the lack of enough excavated area or the particular disposition of certain sites makes the identification of individual units and clusters a challenging task. The traditional approach based on morphological analyses of compounds must be combined with a proper study of the internal disposition as well as the density of streets and houses, in order to observe internal variability and unit division. Only the combination of analytical and quantitative methods can offer an approximation to the social and historical variables that played a role on the formation and evolution of ancient settlements.