Empires are more often analyzed than villages, in the same way that temples are analyzed with more attention than houses – both because because they are more impressive and because they are generally better preserved. . This means that what we know about rural settlement is considerably less compared to other areas of archaeology, but that does not mean that rural settlement is any less significant. Because of the relationship between rural development and urban development, our understanding of rural settlement in the Neo-Assyrian Empire can contribute to our view of the Neo-Assyrian Empire as a whole. For the purposes of this essay – which discusses rural settlement rather than Empire – the Neo-Assyrian Empire is an area within which rural settlement took place and a system within which rural settlement operated . “Rural settlement” as a process (the verb) and “rural settlement” as a place (the noun) are interrelated as cause and consequence (settlement creating settlements) but are approached differently from archaeological point of view (landscape archeology versus site archeology). At present, evidence for Neo-Assyrian rural settlement is dominated by surveys rather than excavations. While this allows us to draw conclusions about the functioning of the Empire in the broad sense, it is difficult to answer questions about daily life within the colonies: who worked in the fields? What were the relationships between men and women? These questions remain largely unanswered. This essay will begin by placing the Neo-Assyrian Empire in a broader context and then briefly discuss the role of various types of site-based evidence for rural settlement. This is followed by three case studies from a broader landscape (Figure 1), which will best support the topic of this essay. The first, Tell Beydar district, s...... middle of paper ......logical landscapes: current issues. Philadelphia: UPenn Museum of Archaeology. Wilkinson, TJ, 2003. Archaeological Landscapes of the Near East. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press. Wilkinson, TJ, 1998. Water and human settlements in the Balikh Valley, Syria: surveys from 1992 to 1995. In Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 63 - 87. Wilkinson, TJ, 1993. Landscape Studies in Upper Mesopotamia. Available at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/ar/92-93/jazira.html [Accessed April 7, 2011]. Winter, I., 2009. Ornament and the “rhetoric of 'abundance' in Assyria. In On art in the ancient Near East: from the first millennium BCE Leiden: BRILL.Yener, AK & Wilkinson, TJ, 2007. Archaeological survey in the Amuq Valley: annual report 1995-1996. Available at: http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/pubs/ar/95-96/amuq.html [Accessed April 10, 2011].