Bronze Age Urbanism in Upper Mesopotamia: Ritual, Power and Community

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With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Glenn Schwartz and an international team of colleagues and students will conduct two seasons of excavation and geophysical survey at Kurd Qaburstan, southwest of Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan (Kurdish Regional Government). This work will study the emergence and functioning of a large urban center of northern Mesopotamia, as a counterpoint to the well-known trajectories of urbanization in southern Mesopotamia. The study of Mesopotamian urbanism and its possible variability is of particular importance because Mesopotamia was the first civilization to produce cities and urban societies. One of the largest sites (118 hectares) on the Erbil plain of northern Mesopotamia, Kurd Qaburstan has a small high mound and an extensive lower town enclosed by a city wall. According to surface materials, the lower town was occupied in the early second millennium BC (Old Babylonian period, ca. 2000-1600 BC), while the high mound was inhabited from ca. 3000 BC to 500 AD. Preliminary analysis suggests that Kurd Qaburstan is ancient Qabra, capital of the Erbil plain in the second millennium BC. The capture and defeat of Qabra by the Mesopotamian conqueror Shamshi-Adad ca. 1800 BC was the subject of two monumental stone steles now housed in the Louvre and in the Baghdad Museum.Since the lower town at Kurd Qaburstan is primarily datable to the Old Babylonian era, it provides an excellent opportunity to study a northern Mesopotamian city from that period in great detail. The depositional accumulation on the lower town is relatively modest, so excavation can expose very large extensions of occupation from one period. The project will provide new information on the layout, neighborhoods, households, and public structures of a north Mesopotamian metropolis preserved below the present-day surface at Kurd Qaburstan. The project will thus provide a rare opportunity to study an entire Mesopotamian city at one point in its history. Such a study was attempted in southern Mesopotamia by Elizabeth Stone at Tell Abu Duwari but was cut short by the first Gulf War. Stone proposed a model of heterarchy to understand the organization of southern Mesopotamian urban populations. However, there is reason to suspect that north Mesopotamian urbanism took a distinctly different form from that of southern Mesopotamia, given the ecological differences between the two regions. Therefore, the project will test Stone's model to see if it is applicable to a north Mesopotamian city.The project will also study urban and socio-political development through focusing on under-researched variables like ritual, religion and ideology. In the center of Kurd Qaburstan is a conical mound likely to be a ziggurat, part of a temple complex. Excavation in such a complex with an anthropological approach, studying faunal, archaeobotanical, and microstratigraphic debris, will illuminate the functioning of religious organizations in the development of early urbanism.Geophysical survey will be implemented on the lower town to produce a map of subsurface architecture and acquire a picture of the early second millennium town plan. Such data will also supply useful information on areas for excavation. Excavation on the high tell will include a step trench to document the stratigraphic sequence of the site history and horizontal exposures of the presumed temple area. On the lower town, excavations will aim for broad exposures of Old Babylonian period occupation. The retrieved artifacts, animal bones and plant remains will be studied by relevant specialists to determine patterns of economic and social organization and lifeways in the city.The Kurd Qaburstan project will have a number of broader impacts. Most broadly, the project will expand our understanding of ancient urbanism and of cities in general, why people began to live in cities, and how city life functioned. The project will include and train colleagues and students from Iraqi Kurdistan, which is only recently developing its own archaeological infrastructure after suffering extensively under the regime of Saddam Hussein. Students and colleagues from the U.S., U.K., Italy, Belgium, and other countries will also participate and undergo training in archaeological field techniques.