Back in Erbil.
Where to start? This blog post is a short chronicle of an archaeological expedition to the Near East where I have worked as a field archaeologist for a long time. My first trip to the Near East was as an undergraduate student back in 1984, so it has been a 40-years-long journey. As many of you know, I have long been interested in the ancient empire of the Assyrians and this project continues that interest.
From 1997 to 2014, I directed a expedition to a site in southeastern Turkey called Ziyaret Tepe, the Assyrian city of Tušhan. (see that blog here). Tušhan was a large administrative center of the Assyrian Empire (roughly 9th-7th century BC) and our excavations and surveys revealed a wealth of information about how the empire functioned economically and militarily. We found a palace, imperial storerooms and administrative buildings, and an elaborate fortification system. What we didn’t find much evidence for the lives of commoners in the empire. My new project is an attempt to redress that shortcoming.
In 2022, I started groundwork for a new expedition, the Sebittu Project, which is a multi-year international project aimed at documenting life in the smallest of Assyrian settlements. While archaeologists have excavated Assyrian sites of all sizes, there is a clear bias against digging small sites, which I classify as village, hamlets, and farmsteads (more on that later).
I moved my fieldwork to the Erbil Plain in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq for a number of reasons. First, following the defeat of the ISIS, the regional government in Kurdistan welcomed archaeologists back to a part of the Near East that had been difficult to work in for decades for political reasons. A number of large-scale survey projects fanned out across Iraqi Kurdistan recording the condition of ancient sites we already knew about, and recording thousands of sites that were previously unknown to archaeologists. One of those survey projects, Harvard University’s Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) directed by Dr. Jason Ur was one of those projects. It was the EPAS survey data that was my starting point. Rather than starting from scratch, I used the EPAS database to find sites that might be suitable for exploring rural life in ancient Assyria.
Another reason I came to the Erbil Plain was that I wanted to work in the imperial Assyrian heartland. As the empire expanded, the needs of the great imperial capitals (Nineveh is best known of these cities) grew tremendously requiring an influx of workers many of whom lived in small villages, hamlets, and farmsteads that were founded during this time period. In 2022, I toured a number of sites in the Erbil region, settling on a cluster of seven unassuming ancient sites in a large plain west of the modern city of Erbil that fit my criteria for examining rural life in the Assyrian empire.
Last autumn, three colleagues and I set out to show that this project was feasible given that small sites, almost all of which are located in modern farmland, are often not well preserved. This was a pilot project that needed to answer a simple question: is the information we need still intact under the modern plowzone. The older entries in this blog document that season. The short answer was: yes.
Archaeology is field of tantalizing intellectual questions, and brutal pragmatics. Excavations are very expensive and funding for primary field research in archaeology is scarce. I have a lot of brilliant colleagues out there competing for the same limited pool of funding. Unfortunately, I drew the short straw in 2024 and was unsuccessful in my major funding requests.
However, my mentor (whose motto was “archaeology is the art of the possible”) drove home the importance of keeping a presence in the field and making progress even on a limited scale. So, I scraped together a modest sum of research dollars, packed my bags full of geophysical survey equipment, computers and other gear (padded with a few requisite clothes) and have come to Erbil to try and map the subsurface remains at two the Sebittu Project sites in anticipation of better fortunes for funding next year. With any luck, I will have the partial plans of two ancient Assyrian hamlets that will guide our future selection of excavation units in the 2025 field season. Check back here for updates as the field project unfolds.
I made it to the dig house late on Saturday after a very long flight. First things first, check all the gear and make sure that nothing was broken or lost in transport. Everything looks good. Now, time for a long rest