Remote Sensing of Ancient Mesopotamian Settlement Systems

该奖项由2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助。在国家科学基金会的支持下，伊丽莎白·斯通博士将探索与美索不达米亚古代相关的定居点的组织，那里是已知的第一个复杂社会的发源地。数字地球公司提供的商业卫星图像具有足够高的分辨率，足以记录地下泥砖建筑的痕迹。在理想情况下，可以看到整个城市、城镇和村庄的规划。无论是在下雨后，还是由于灌溉产生的湿气渗入场地内，墙和房间填充的不同干燥都会产生建筑痕迹，从而使这一点成为可能。因此，这个项目有两个目标。一是更好地了解降雨、灌溉和遗址高度之间的关系，从而产生清晰可见的地表痕迹；二是获取位于整个冲积层的各种大小的图像和地图，日期为公元前5,000至1年。挖掘出的公共建筑将第一次被置于整个聚落的规划中，可以将大城市的组织结构与小村庄的组织结构进行比较。这些建筑规划可以用来回答与宫殿和其他公共建筑-寺庙、港口、储存设施、防御工事等-的集中特征分布有关的广泛问题，以及对更大的社会结构的调查。富人和穷人在身体上是分开的吗？如果是，他们是住在不同的社区还是住在不同的定居点？有什么证据可以集中规划定居点？在一些定居点有饲养家畜的设施，但在另一些定居点没有吗？这些问题是解决长期争论的基础，争论的焦点是最早的复杂社会是建立在对广大人口的广泛剥削的基础上，还是社会流动性和更多的公共决策至少同样重要。这个项目的智力价值在于它将提供无与伦比的洞察力，让人们了解构成世界最早文明的城市、城镇和村庄的空间组织。人类学家开发的理解早期复杂社会发展的各种方法在相对较小的区域进行了测试，这些区域通常位于每种文明的较大遗址内，目标是发展的早期阶段。相比之下，这个项目将开发一个关于定居社会所有元素的更大、更广泛的数据样本，考察城市和农村遗址，覆盖五千年的发展。该项目收集的数据将与伊拉克同事分享，他们在多年的战争和史无前例的考古遗址掠夺后，正在努力重建他们的文物服务。这项研究的广泛影响包括使用通过该项目购买的图像进行遗址保护。从长远来看，我们的数据将允许考古学家--无论是伊拉克人还是外国人--选择调查地点，并在这些地点中选择挖掘地点。此外，识别有用图像的方法应该适用于其他地理区域，如埃及、印度河，也许还有中国和美国西南部。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Elizabeth Stone will explore the organization of settlements associated with ancient Mesopotamia, where the first known complex societies developed. Commercial satellite imagery available from the Digital Globe Corporation has a resolution sufficiently high to record traces of sub-surface mud-brick architecture. Under ideal circumstances plans of entire cities, towns and villages can be seen. Differential drying of walls and room fill either after a rain or due to moisture from irrigation seeping up within the site produces the architectural traces that make this possible. This project therefore has two goals. One is to better understand the relationship between rainfall, irrigation and site height which results in clearly visible surface traces; the second is to acquire imagery and map sites of all sizes located throughout the alluvium and dated between 5,000 to 1 BC. For the first time, the excavated public buildings will be placed within the plan of the entire settlement and comparisons can be drawn between the organization of the major cities and that of tiny villages.These architectural plans can be used to answer a broad array of questions relating to the distribution of centralizing features such as palaces and other public buildings - temples, harbors, storage facilities, fortifications and the like - as well as an investigation of larger social structures. Were the rich and poor physically segregated? If so, did they live in different neighborhoods or in different settlements? What evidence is there for centralized planning of settlements? Were there facilities for keeping domestic herd animals in the some settlements but not in others? These issues are fundamental to resolving a long-standing debate over whether the earliest complex societies were based on the wide-spread exploitation of the mass of the population, or whether social mobility and more communal decision-making were at least as important.The intellectual merit of this project is the unparalleled insight it will provide into the spatial organization of the cities, towns and villages that made up the world's earliest civilization. The wide variety of approaches to understanding the development of early complex society developed by anthropologists have been tested on excavations of relatively small areas usually located within the larger sites of each civilization and targeting the earlier stages of development. By contrast this project will develop a large and broader sample of data on all elements within the settled society, examining both urban and rural sites and covering five millennia of development. The data collected by this project will be shared with Iraqi colleagues who are struggling to rebuild their antiquities service after years of war and unprecedented looting of archaeological sites. The broad impact of this study includes the use of the imagery purchased through this project for site protection. In the longer term, our data will allow archaeologists - Iraqi or foreign - to choose sites for investigation and, within those sites, chose areas for excavation. Moreover, the methods for identifying useful imagery should be applicable to other geographic areas, such as the Egypt, the Indus, and perhaps China and the American Southwest.