Old tech with a new twist.

Less than a kilometer south of Kharaba Tawus, at a lower elevation near the modern road, there are a series of mudbrick buildings standing in contrast to the modern cinder block constructions that make up the majority of structures on the western Erbil plain. We identified them a brick kilns where the ancient technology of handmade fired brickmaking was still practiced, but with a few modern twists. Seeing activity down at the kilns, one morning Mary, Rafeeq, and I took an hour away from the excavations to investigate and learn about this craft.

We met Qasim and his assistant at their brick kiln, There were in the final process of stacking the kiln with 40,000 sun-dried but not-yet-fired bricks, all made by hand in moulds and ready to be fired. The doorway underneath Qasim (dress in black) leads into the kiln interior but it is blocked with bricks. In fact, the entire structure they are standing on is filled with bricks. They were just putting on the last few rows. Over the following days they would cover all the top bricks with a thick layer of mud plaster, sealing the kiln. Qasim’s assistant has staged bricks next to him that he is handing up six or eight at time to Qasim. On the left are a pile of finished, baked bricks ready for use.

The bricks are made with clay dug up in a pit about a kilometer or so away from the kiln, mixed with straw brought in from the fields, and water. You can see that the recipe is pretty variable. The straw helps keep the bricks from cracking during firing and cooling. When they are fired, the straw has been burnt away, but leaves a negative impression on the clay. We see this tell-tale impression on bricks (both fired and sun-dried) dating all the way back to the Neolithic. Old tech!

Here are bricks that have been formed in rough wooden moulds and stacked to let them air and sun dry. Once thoroughly dried, they can be put in the kiln. Putting bricks that still have water in their cores into the kiln causes them to explode upon exposure to high heat. These bricks are laid out on a specially prepared surface made of animal dung and straw that can be pressed into a flat surface to which the bricks don’t stick when still wet. The small pile of material in the left background of this photo is actually a pile of straw ready for use in brick making.

So the bricks are made and dried. They are stacked in a vast organized heap filling the inside of the kiln, which is in essence a square room with brick walls covered in mudplaster. The kiln is sealed at the top. How does the firing work?

We went to a second nearby kiln that was empty to document the interior of the firing chamber. Below the kiln is a large open space, another entire room, that has a grill-like ceiling leading into the kiln. Here you can see the openings leading from this below-ground firing chamber into the kiln. The bricks were stacked over and on top of the grill openings with enough space between them to allow the passage of hot air between the bricks during firing. This is what Qasim’s kiln looks like when it’s empty.

Around the side of the kiln is a passage that leads down into the firing chamber, which has two parts. One is the room below the kiln with the grill-like ceiling. This subterranean room conducts the heat up into the kiln. The second part is where Rafeeq is heading in this photo. It is the room where the fire is set. The walls are charred from intense heat. The fire in this chamber will burn for three days, according to Qasim, driving all the remaining water out of the bricks and slightly fusing the clay-mud mixture into a durable, permanent brick.

This is where the technological twist comes in. In ancient times, the kiln would have been fired with wood, brush, or animal dung which had been prepared for use as fuel. The modern countryside is largely devoid of wood and while animal dung is still used for some domestic tasks, it has largely been replaced for use in brick making by an energy source plentiful in the region — petrol.

This picture might seem oddly out of place, but it is actually quite important. The modern brick kilns use old clothing to soak up the petrol for firing the kilns. For three days, that small chamber will, in essence, be fed gasoline-soaked rags to keep the fire burning hot and even enough to fire the stacked bricks. This process involves no advanced machinery to run; the skill of the brickmaker ensures that the bricks are fired long enough for them to be fully strengthened but not too long that they are ruined in the process. These kilns, like those in ancient times, could be overfired, ruining the bricks and the kiln itself, and creating a hard, spongy mass we call slag. Ruined bricks and pottery are called wasters and when we find wasters at an archaeological site, we know that the ancient inhabitants had used such kilns to make bricks, pottery, metals, or other materials requiring the controlled use of high heat.

We were told that the firing of Qasim’s brick kiln was going to happen in the next few days, so stay tuned to see how it all works out.

Familiar and not so familiar.

One of the fun puzzles in archaeology is when you find something that you don’t immediately recognize. Most of the artifacts we find are broken, often shattered into tiny pieces, which makes the puzzle even harder to sort out. Through laboratory study we can often determine some of the functions of an artifact, collecting data on the tiny scratches left on stone or metal tools when they were used (called “microwear”) or by comparing ancient artifacts with historic, or even modern, parallels (called “comparanda”). We scour through reports written by our colleagues for similar artifacts, and sometimes we take samples of residues still adhering to the tools that provide more information on their function.

Top side of the celt showing careful working of the stone. The artifact is also weathered suggesting at some point it was exposed on the ground surface.

Here is the working edge.

This is a stone tool, 5 cm long, made of a very fine-grained stone. It has been laboriously shaped by using a harder stone to peck away at the original piece to produce a symmetrical tapered tool with a straight cutting edge on one end. They tend to be widest just behind the cutting edge, tapering in a bit as towards the edge.

Everyone on my team instantly recognized this as a “celt” in archaeological terminology. Celts come in many sizes and with numerous variations in shape. They were produced in prehistory across the ancient Near East and were eventually replaced functionally by copper and bronze tools. For anyone who does heritage woodworking, this is probably a recognizable tool, used much as modern hand chisels are for shaving, cutting, and shaping wood.

This was found at Kharaba Tawus and it was probably made between 6000 and 4500 BC. We know that Kharaba Tawus was occupied at this time because the site has produced a large number of prehistoric sherds of the Halaf and Northern Ubaid ceramic traditions. These well-documented painted pottery types are very distinctive and tell us that long before the Iron Age, this place housed a prehistoric settlement that forms the bottom layers of the low rise we are excavating.

The view shows the broken section of the artifact (the other side is smooth and finished). You can see the red area immediately below the blackened surface.

Less obvious is this limestone object about 12 cm in diameter and 5.5 cm thick, also found at Kharaba Tawus. It is clearly shaped with a short round base and a wide round top which flares out to form a shallow concave surface. The stone is a type we call “Mosul marble”. We are not sure what this object was used for, but the surface has clearly been burned. In fact, a red layer can clearly be seen penetrating the stone about 1.5cm below the burnt surface, which suggests that something might have been repeatedly burnt in the shallow concave dish at the top.

One possibility is that this artifact might have been an incense burner, an object we know was used in religious practices in various cultures across the ancient Near East. The stone is not local, so it was either brought to Kharaba Tawus as a raw material, or perhaps as a finished artifact. Once we are back in our offices we will start the process of looking for comparanda from other excavations to help us provide a date, function, and cultural affiliation for this curious find. If anyone has an idea or a good parallel, feel free to email me.

Unexpected find.

Please be advised that this blog post contains photographs of human burials.

Our progress on the excavations at Kharaba Tawus was slowed by the discovery of several infant burials at the bottom of the plowzone at the site. Finding late unmarked graves is a common occurrence as archaeological sites are typically found on high ground, or on anthropogenic mounds created through long-term occupation in which the decay of mudbrick houses accumulates over centuries or even millennia of use. After settlements are abandoned and the buildings decayed, such high places are often chosen for informal burial grounds by locals and visitors alike.

We cannot say for certain when the burials were cut into the collapsed buildings of Kharaba Tawus. Modern plowing has truncated the burials, the locations of which were sometimes originally covered by a stone or a few potsherds. One of the infant burials was cut into an ancient pit which we think may be of Iron Age date, so that burial was later in time than the pit. If we are correct that the pit was of Iron Age date, then the burials must be more recent than the pit. Archaeologists would say that the Iron Age the terminus post quem.

This burial, possible of a neonate was badly disturbed in antiquity and few bones remain intact. The size and fragility of infant bones makes their preservation much less common than adult human bones.

That said, 2500 years separates the end of the Iron Age from the beginning of modern plowing, so our dating is very rough at this point. None of the burials contained any burial goods like pottery that would have helped us date the burials. The orientation of the bodies may suggest that they are Islamic which would narrow down the possible dates to the last 1300 years, but that is still a large date range.

This infant burial was also badly disturbed in antiquity. The cut made for the burial was deep and very narrow. In ancient times, infant mortality rates were very high. Although precise figures are not available, some scholars suggest that pre-modern mortality rates were as high as between one-third and half of children not surviving infancy.

In consultation with our government representatives, it was decided that given the unknown age but likely antiquity of the burials, the most appropriate action was to clean and briefly record the skeletons in situ, and then to collect the bones and ask our Kurdish colleagues to rebury them. We were informed that this was acceptable to local religious leaders and in line with common practice on archaeological sites in the region.

Our morning routine.

I arrived in Erbil two weeks ago and the workday has now settled into a comfortable routine for the most part. We start work at sunrise to take advantage of the relative cool and leave the field when the heat gets too intense to work efficiently. We seem to have settled on 108 degrees F as our upper threshold, which took us back towards the dig house at 10:30 or 11:00am when we first started work. The temperatures have cooled a bit the last few days and as we slip into September, we will be able to work later into the early afternoon. Of course, sunrise will also be later, so we will have to start later as well.

Most of us are up around 3am to get ready for the day – tea and coffee, packing up supplies and equipment for the day, a nice cool shower. Our driver, Ahmet, arrives with the team bus at 4am and we all pile in for the long commute to the site.

The dig bus. Comfortably fits eight of us, our driver, and the equipment we need for the day.

After stopping at the Directorate to pick up our four Kurdish archaeologists, the bus makes two essential stops for our workday. First, we buy ice and water from a pleasant older man who sets up outside a hardware store with a palette loaded with large slabs of ice which he breaks up with a crowbar to fill our ice chests and bottles of water.

Next, we stop at a roadside bakery where fresh bread shaped kind of like pita is made in a simple brick oven, at an industrial rate. It is a popular spot for laborers and the bread disappears as soon as it is pulled from the fire. Our bus smells like hot bread for the remainder of the journey. Sometimes there is vendor selling hot chickpeas and beans, which we pick up as a supplement for our site breakfast. With cold water and food acquired, we head through the village to Mastawa and on to our dig site.

Roadside bakery on the outskirts of Erbil. They open at 3am! There is no menu, just bread.

By the time we get to Kharaba Tawus, the workmen have already arrived from the local village in their pickup truck and usually the tents are up and the picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows are waiting to start work. As the sun rises, we are awake and focused and work starts in earnest. We seem to always be racing the sun and the heat, but I find the quiet mornings are perfect for digging.

Sunrise on the western Erbil plains. In summer there is a permanent haze in the sky from the oil wells that support the economy of Iraqi Kurdistan. The flames from gas flaring, as well as the dust raised from the baked earth, both contribute to the haze, and make for spectacular sunrises.

Breaking ground.

As you know, the Sebittu Project involves survey and excavation at seven sites clustered in the western Erbil plain. After I arrived in Kurdistan, one of the first items on my long to-do list was to visit each site and assess the field conditions at present. The spring was relatively wet here, so the winter crops like wheat were good and there was plenty of grazing for the herds of goats and sheep kept by the farmers. While good news, this presented us with a challenge because normally by now much of the stubble from the wheat fields would have been grazed and, thus, the ground would be clear and surface survey easy because any sherds on the ground could be easily spotted. However, this season, several of the sites still had a 15cm or so of wheat stubble, making for poor visibility.

In our conditions assessment, we did find two sites that were reasonably clear of groundcover. One was Kharaba Tawuz, which you read about earlier. The other is an unnamed site known by its EPAS survey number as #290. I will introduce you to these sites, and the others, over the course of this blog. Being small sites, they are somewhat hard to see from the ground unless you know what you are looking for. A very subtle rise in the middle of the field may well reveal an archaeological site.

Photograph of Kharaba Tawuz taken facing west in the early morning. We took advantage of the low, raking light to create shadows on the site.

Above is a drone photo taken early this morning at Kharaba Tawuz. With the long shadows, you can see the small rise that comprises the ancient site in the plowed field to the left of the track. Aerial photography has been in use in archaeology for over a century. The drone and digital camera have replaced prop-driven airplanes and film cameras and have greatly improved our mapping of the ancient landscape.

Using Britt’s surface survey, and the site topography, as a guide, we chose an area for excavation that started off as a 2.5m by 2.5m trench, but has now expanded twice so that it covers three times that area. The top 40 cm is soil that was badly churned up by the modern plowing of the field. Below that, though, we found layers that were less disturbed and contained the first intact, in situ archaeological deposits of the Sebittu project, some possibly dating to the Iron Age. More to come on what we found.

On the ground.

One question that archaeologists often get asked is ‘how do you know where to dig’? It’s a good, logical question, and one which is answered differently depending on where you are working, which cultures you and what time periods you are interested in, and what your research questions are.

We are primarily interested in documenting village and farm life in the first millennium BC, so we want to find the houses, pits, hearths, and storage rooms that people used in the Iron Age. Rather than just randomly starting to dig, we search the surface as carefully as possible for any clue about what is below ground. Sometimes this involves looking at satellite maps and aerial or drone photographs.

This is a drone image provided to us by Jason Ur and his EPAS team at Site 275. The contour lines show the elevations at the site with white being high elevations. This images shows our survey points (marked with coordinates) an specific find spots of items on the ground. Drone photography has revolutionized the way archaeologists record the landscape.

Surface survey involves collecting the artifacts that are just lying on top of the surface of the ground, often pulled up by the plow during preparing the fields for planting. These artifacts, although they are not in the place where ancient people left them (a condition we call in situ), they still give us an indication of what is below ground.

Britt and Tara set up the survey grid with tapes and wooden stakes under the careful observation of Gareeb and Mary.

Sarah took these photographs of our survey at Site 275, which a local landowner said is called Kharaba Tawus (Kurdish for “Mound of the Peacock”). After we have laid out a grid of survey squares 20m by 20m with wooden pegs marking the corners, the team lines up evenly spaced and slowly walks across the square picking up pottery. Britt then determines which sherds can be dated (these are called “diagnostics”) and all the useful sherds from each square are bagged and tagged. Later, back at the dig house, Britt compiles a distribution map showing where the greatest concentration of Iron Age pottery is found. That is where we dig!

The survey line moves across the southern field at Site 275. Mary is closest to the camera here and Rafeeq is at the far end of the 20m line. Surface survey is hot, dusty work but it is an important way to figure out what’s below ground.

Building relationships.

The last two days have been pretty hectic with important preparations. The morning after I arrived, we went to check in with the government officials who oversee all the foreign archaeological projects in Kurdistan. These visits are, at one level, a formality and a chance to catch up with our colleagues at the Directorates. Importantly, this is also a time when a lot of arrangements are made and details worked out for the upcoming fieldwork.

The Director-General of Antiquities and Heritage for Kurdistan, Kak Kaify Mustafa Ali, has been very supportive of the Sebittu Project and has guided my permit request through the many approval stages. Here is a photo from our meeting at the General Directorate. There are over sixty archaeological expeditions across Kurdistan in operation this year so the General Directorate is a busy place.

Me, Kak Kaify, and Jason at the General-Directorate.

There is a separate Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage in Erbil which oversees the day-to-day operations of projects in the Erbil region. The Director in Erbil is Kak Nader Babakr who worked with me on a rescue excavation that we conducted at the site of Qalachogan last year. He will be very involved in our work at the Sebittu sites.

Kak Nader and Dr. Petra Creamer of Emory University setting up a drone flight over the site of Qalachogan in August 2022.

The staff at the Erbil Directorate provides support in many way. Most immediately, yesterday they provided us with documentation of our permission to work in the region. Two of the staff came out with us to deliver our credentials to the local police and the internal security forces (Asayish) in the area of the Erbil Plain where we are working. Since we are working on private lands, it is vital that local farmers and landowners know who we are and what we are doing, and that we have support from local authorities, especially the local governor (mudir nahiye) and the mayor (mukhtar) of the villages near where we will work. Forging and maintaining good local relations is key to a successful project.

After meeting with the local authorities, the team piled into our vehicles and went out to two of the sites where we will be working this season to see what the conditions were on the ground. I’ll put up more photos and details soon so you can see exactly where we will be this season.

A long journey out.

Flying to the field is much different than flying on a holiday. For one thing, I have a lot more luggage than a trip to visit friends, with all of the equipment and supplies taking up far more room than clothes or personal items. While I can buy almost anything in a modern city like Erbil, I often bring specific items for work that are hard to find – like Sharpies – as well as technical equipment like magnetic gradiometers and Munsell colorcharts. I left home with five bags of gear and supplies, and I expect to return home with about the same amount, having swapped supplies and consumables for bags full of samples to be sent to specialist laboratories.

My itinerary this year took me to Philadelphia from Cleveland (the closest large airport to Akron), and then on a 12.5 hour flight to Doha in Qatar, and finally a third leg straight to Erbil. Having seen a lot of airports in my travels, it takes something special to stand out and the Doha Airport certainly makes the effort. I’m not sure if this is a real or a fake forest immediately adjacent to my gate for Erbil, but one could almost believe for a moment that you were in a botanical gardens, not sitting at gate C27.

Anyway, the flight was uneventful although my fifth bag – the gradiometer – raised some eyebrows and some questions as I was leaving the airport, and the machine was ultimately detained at the airport by security. I had two letters of permission to bring in the equipment from the Antiquities and Heritage authorities, but some other documents from the Directorate could not be located by airport security in their own files, so for the next few days, the gradiometer was stuck at Erbil airport (don’t worry, I got it back!) while calls and arrangements were made for its release.

I was met at the airport by Jason, and two of his team members who had also just arrived in Erbil, and their driver. Bapir whisked us away to the house where the EPAS team was staying for the season in the Ankawa district. Even though it was late by the time we got to the house, there was lots of action on the streets of the quickly-expanding city. Given the high mid-day temperatures, people stay inside during the early afternoon as much as possible and, after sunset, the restaurants and shops open up again for business. Below is a typical street scene in Erbil. I took this photo only a minute’s walk from the house.

Step One complete – get to Erbil with all the gear!

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.

Welcome to the Sebittu Project.

In the Akkadian language, the term sebittu (literally “the seven”) referred astronomically to a cluster of seven stars, the group we now call the Pleiades. My new archaeological project, the Sebittu Project, focuses on the exploration of seven small agrarian settlements dating to the Neo-Assyrian period (c. 900-600 BC, part of the Iron Age) clustered on a flat, dusty plain to the west of modern Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan.

As you will see in coming posts, these are unlikely and unassuming subjects for archaeological attention, but they hold great promise for providing useful information about the agrarian economy of the Neo-Assyrian empire, and about the everyday life of the Iron Age people who farmed the land and grazed their flocks here some three thousand years ago. Archaeologically, we know little about day-to-day life in the hundreds of small villages, hamlets, and farmsteads that dotted the wide plains in the imperial heartland of ancient Assyria.

Erbil citadel and market. August 2022.

My team and I arrive next week and I hope to provide regular updates on our progress. Above is a photo of the Erbil citadel I took last year while on the exploratory visit that led to my selection of our sites. Our dig house is located in Erbil and we will make daily trips out to the field. Erbil is a vibrant, modern city with a long and important past. More on that to come.