Cornfields in Assyria.

Stamped and signed letters in hand, we made the rounds of regional Asayish and government offices to ensure that everyone knows who we are, what we are doing, and that we have official papers documenting our permission to work. That finished, Bapir, Rafeeq and I drove southwest from Erbil to visit each of the seven Sebittu Project sites and make a determination of where we want to work this season. There is a map of the location of the sites on my website here.

All seven sites are at least in part being used as contemporary agricultural land and it is very unpredictable where summer crops will be grown. Often farmers will plant crops in a field for a few years, and then let it go fallow, while at other times they will try a get two or even three summer crops out of the same field. This year is a year of corn. Maize is a New World crop, so it is an invasive species brought back to Europe and the Old World starting the 15th century AD. Why corn now? One of my local informants suggested that Kurdistan normally gets much of its corn from Ukraine and the war in that country has created a strong need for locally-grown corn in northern Iraq. It is a water-intensive crop, so new wells, pumps, and irrigation pipes are proliferating.

Below is a photograph of the site of Kharaba Tawus in September 2023 as our team, under the direction of Dr. Mary Shepperson, excavated some Neo-Assyrian features at the site.

Here was that exact same spot yesterday. The cornfield covers many hectares and behind me when I took this photo was a very large irrigation pond (nicknamed “fish ponds” locally) where water was stored to irrigate the fields and fish are grown for local consumption.

Corn is intruding on several other Sebittu sites this year. We also saw extensive summer vegetable patches, and even fields of parsley. The summer in Iraqi Kurdistan is brutally hot (today reached 108ºF) with cloudless and rainless skies. All summer crops are grown via irrigation which is often destructive for the underlying archaeology, so the increased use of irrigation channels is one of the reasons we want to document the ancient landscape before it is gone.

After seeing all the sites and evaluating the practicality of working there, and the potential for interesting results, I have decided to start at Site #298. It is a hamlet of less that 2 ha. We’ve worked at a larger village and a smaller farmstead, so this gives us some baseline data on all three site sizes. It is also the only site where all the surface pottery is Neo-Assyrian in date. Finally, while there is not corn on the site itself, there are cornfields nearby that have expanded from last year, so this might be a good time to get the survey done before the corn invades. I’ll post some results from the geophysical survey at Site #298 soon.

Site #298.

A formal beginning.