As my students would tell you.
As my anthropology students will tell you, archaeology is the study of human past through its material remains. Unlike historians whose expertise is in old documents, archaeologists focus attention on the past by looking at what people left behind: abandoned buildings, pits full of trash, graves, broken pottery, stone and iron tools, bits of clothing, even the seeds from their dinners. The technical term for all of this stuff is “material culture”. We reconstruct the way people lived, how they built their houses, grew their crops, and made tools and used oven made of clay. With patience, we can even determine what their family kinship pattern was and what sort of political system they used.
Over the next month, my colleagues and I are going to be excavating at a couple of very small ancient hamlets and farmsteads that were inhabited, we think, between 900 and 600 BC. How do we know that these places were occupied at that time? Good question. The answer, at least for now, is pottery! The styles of pottery that people used changed through time, just like the fashions and fads of today. After two hundred years of excavation in ancient Mesopotamia, archaeologists now have a reasonably good idea of when and by whom certain styles of pottery were made. Since baked clay is nearly indestructible, we have literally thousands of pieces of pottery (again, the technical term is “sherd”, not shard) at many sites.
This is a photo of a rock mound that a farmer piled up at the edge of his field on one of the Assyrian sites we will be working at. Just a pile of rocks? Look again. There are modern artifacts like the piece or black rubber, and lots of plain rocks, and at least four ancient artifacts in this one photo.
Find a place on the ground littered with Assyrian style sherds and you have a likely Assyrian settlement. Map out the spread of the sherds on the ground and you have some idea of how big the settlement was when the Assyrians lived there. This process is hard, time-consuming work, but it was the first step in locating our seven sites. Luckily for us, my colleague Jason Ur at Harvard University has been working in the Erbil region for over a decade and his team completed initial surveys of all the sites long before I came to Erbil. His project is called the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey. In August 2022, Jason and I went out to assess the scientific potential of some of the sites he and his team had previously mapped, and from those visits the Sebittu Project was born.
Below is Jason’s survey team when I visited them in August 2022. Archaeology is always a team effort and this crew covered a lot of ground on foot and by drone. Jason is fourth from the right in this photo. And, yes, there are artifacts at the feet of the survey crew. Pottery is everywhere.
