ABSTRACT
Northwestern Syria can be considered a representative and fundamental area for understanding the development of urbanization and the rise of complex societies in the Near East during the third millennium BC. Since the last century, this region has been investigated in an attempt to obtain new data to analyze the formation of large urban settlements, major regional centres, and capital sites such as Ebla. Common to many other contemporary archaeological explorations in the Old World, these early surveys were often conducted to single out a site representative of the region to be subsequently investigated in detail through stratigraphic excavation. A remarkable shift in such a strategy took place only at the end of the last century and it resulted in a dramatic collection of archaeological data acquired at a regional scale, especially in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. Archaeological survey can be considered an essential step in any long-term program of investigating a region's human history.
