Today, we look for the cradle of civilization. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them. I'm struck by a photo of a lean tanned
woman, 78 years old, in the new Science magazine. She's Joan
Oates, in charge of excavations of Tell Brak, Syria. Tell Brak
is one in a line of such archeological digs, strung out east and
west, close to Turkey's border with Syria and Iraq. Oates has
been digging in this region since the 1950s. Writer Andrew
Lawler tells how she met her now-deceased husband David Oates
here, as well as archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife It's
long been a tenet of Archaeology that civilization arose in
Mesopotamia -- the fertile triangle that embraced Baghdad and
the region south of it. That region showed a high degree of
urban organization almost 5500 years ago. But these sites on the
lower edge of western Turkey's mountains are older still. And
they lie a couple hundred m