The slow march of science.

It has been a while since my last post so I want to catch you up on our progress. We have fallen into a very productive, methodical routine for collecting field data. With temperatures coming down quite a bit over the past week, we are able to work later into the day. We even had clouds and a very brief rain storm yesterday.

Sunrise over the Erbil Plain on the first day of autumn.

Part of my plan for this season was to start to train some of the archaeologists at the Directorates of Antiquities and Heritage in the use of geophysical surveying. To that end, Rafeeq Bardosti on our team has been learning the basics of these techniques. We started with the easy part – data collection. This involves carrying a handheld magnetic field gradiometer perfectly in a vertical position without letting it swing while walking at an exactly even pace in a straight line for 20m, then turning around doing the same thing in the opposite direction, for hours. It is not very exciting to watch.

Rafeeq collecting gradiometry data at Site 298 (Sirawa). Abdullah (in the background) and I are moving the rope (painted with marks at each meter) that Rafeeq is walking along. Once he finished this line of data, we shift the rope 50cm to the east and he walks back towards Abdullah. The gradiometer beeps at each meter mark. Forty lines of data per grid square. It is pretty hypnotic.

Yesterday, we went over a slightly trickier procedure, which is I showed Rafeeq how to balance the machine so that the two sensors use to measure a gradient of the Earth’s magnetic field are precisely located above each other along a 0.5m long tube. Rafeeq has watched me do this all season – tomorrow morning it is his turn! It is one thing to watch and another to master this step. I also demonstrated how to transfer the data from the gradiometer to the computer with Rafeeq today. Those are the three basic field steps. He is really sharp and has picked up quickly – and he has a steadier hand than I do in carrying the machine.

Drone image of the work area on Site 298. The northern edge of the site has been badly eroded and much of the site is lost. There is a canal to the north of the site that has moved through time and at one point appears to have come far south and cut into the ancient remains.

Here are what the results look like. This is largely unprocessed data, but it gives you some sense of the slow march of science. We collect three to five 20m x 20m grid squares each day, slowly moving across the site. This map shows the best 172,800 data points we’ve collected at Site 298.

Which reminds me, we have a name for Site 298 from one of the locals: Sirawa (literally ‘the place of garlic’) which is not very creative since it is also the name of the nearest village, but it is now the name of this ancient place. We are almost certain to never what the Assyrians called this small hamlet as it was probably never important enough to be written down.

The map is a drone photo taken by Jason from EPAS for us. The red line is the current site boundary, which we have modified since starting work this season. The light red shading in the SE is an area that we added after doing a quick survey of pottery in the region, so our site is getting bigger. The gridded gray overlay is the current gradiometry data (the light blue squares are not yet collected). There may be some buildings in the data, but the main features are a number of large pits (black circles) which have a strong signature because the soil inside has been magnetically enhanced through human activity. The question for next season is whether or not they are Iron Age in date. With this map in hand, we can find their exact location in the flat, featureless agricultural fields and start the excavations at Sirawa.