High Risk: Deltaic Resilience and the Genesis of Mesopotamian Cities (Iraq)

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With support from the National Science Foundation Drs. Jennifer Pournelle, Carrie Hritz and Jennifer Smith will conduct a reconnaissance of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial lowlands in order to investigate the contribution of wetland resources to the emergence and growth of cities in southern Mesopotamia, the earliest and longest-lived urban heartland in the world. With representatives from the Iraqi Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the team will (1) conduct reconnaissance of previously excavated sites, in order to identify loci for geoarchaeological data collection (2) assess the University of Basrah Department of Geology's physical capacity for sample storage and analysis, and (3) with Basrah colleagues, explore newly accessible areas and select specific locations for geoarchaeological coring and seismological imaging. This area includes a just-discovered relict landscape comprising over 4,000 hectares of now-dry, densely packed building foundations, fields, and canals previously submerged beneath Lake Hammar. Restoration of the Hammar marshes is now a high national priority and if quick action is not taken, the window of opportunity for conducting work in this region will close. The team will meet with faculty, government officials, and logistics and security personnel in order to prepare detailed plans, draft support contracts, obtain necessary permits, select locations, and collect pilot data toward a fully developed proposal for submission to NSF. Envisioned subsequent research will include a multi-year, multi-national program of geoarchaeological, geomorphological, and ethnoarchaeological survey and excavation aimed at rapid collection of evidence essential to assessing millennial-scale human-environment interaction in the deltaic landscape of southern Iraq during the 5th - 3rd millennia BC, when urban civilization arose there.The Tigris-Euphrates delta of southern Iraq is the locus of a continuous urbanpresence over five millennia. While new research indicates that contemporary proto-urban polities arose in the plains of northern Syria and southwestern Iran, those polities did not exhibit the robust longevity of the urban centers that emerged in Iraq's alluvial lowlands. Available evidence suggests that populations of the southern alluvium drew significant wealth and transportation advantage from their situation in a prograding deltaic system that provided varied and abundant resources even through cycles of dramatic climatic fluctuation. This deltaic resiliency, it is hypothesized sustained urbanizing processes in southern Mesopotamia through multiple, and multivariate, systemic changes in humans interactions with each other and their shifting environment. This award will launch a research program to test this hypothesis. This project has high potential for developing cooperative efforts throughout the Gulf region. With the University of Basrah, the project will, hopefully, build bridges to a new generation of Iraqi faculty and graduate students. Results will provide a basis for comparative studies of regions/ polities in other deltaic contexts such as the Indus Valley (Harrapan), coastal Peru (Caral-Supe, Chimu), Veracruz (Olmec), and Egypt, where coring programs in the Nile delta have shown that the earliest, most complex settlements coalesced within deltaic wetlands and their productivity was essential to state emergence.