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.