Akiva’s dissertation project centers around the inter-cultural confrontations and conversations that happened in the Upper Euphrates region as the world’s first large-scale institutions were collapsing, at the beginning of the third millennium BCE. This research relies mostly on notes from excavations that took place from 1968 to 1974 before many of the valleys of the Upper Euphrates region were flooded by the construction of the Keban Dam. The Fulbright-Hays DDRA fellowship will allow him to consider two very different sites in the region, whose notes can now be found in the archives of Istanbul University and the British Institute in Ankara, respectively: Tepecik is a site where the central institutions were violently destroyed at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, followed by centuries of violence, fortification, isolation, and material conservatism. Taşkun Mevkii, meanwhile, is a site where there is no evidence of violence or attempts at fortification, and where cultural templates from different geographic origins seemingly comingled freely.