Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey

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With NSF support, the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS) will investigate the landscape of the core of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (ca. 900-600 BC) in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Evidence suggests that Assyrian kings deliberately transformed the landscape through forced migration of conquered peoples, the agricultural colonization of arable lands, and the modification of natural hydrology through dams and canals. EPAS will evaluate this hypothesis in the heart of the Assyrian empire by means of a 3-year archaeological survey of 3,200 km2. Despite its archaeological importance, the Assyrian heartland has never been surveyed systematically. The initial phase will employ satellite imagery to identify archaeological sites and landscape features (e.g., canals, subterranean karez water systems, trackways). Subsequently, these places will be visited, mapped, and surface artifacts collected. At the same time, the project will visit canals, trackways, and carved reliefs to confirm their identifications and map them. The project will describe the Neo-Assyrian landscape as well as earlier and subsequent patterns.This project will investigate the geographical consequences of forced migration and the power of early empires to redesign their environments, and will produce a model of an early imperial landscape. It will test a new satellite remote sensing methodology that has yet to receive rigorous ground truthing. Because of the fortuitous juxtaposition of new digital survey techniques, the history of research, and new political stability and desire for collaboration by Iraqis, this project has the potential to reconstruct ancient settlement and land use on a scale comparable to the great surveys of Sumer, Oaxaca, and the Valley of Mexico, but undertaken with spatial technologies unavailable to this earlier generation of projects.EPAS will train American and other Western graduate students in field survey, remote sensing, and spatial analysis. It will introduce these concepts to Iraqi archaeology students, who have been particularly disadvantaged in technical and methodological training. Field data from EPAS be a part of thesis research, conference presentation, and publication for all of these students. EPAS will form collaborations with Iraqi museums, universities, and antiquities directorates; these institutions and their personnel are now emerging from decades of international isolation, and in some cases persecution by the former Baathist government. The resulting inventory of sites and landscape features will be provided to Antiquities organizations at the local and national level, for incorporation into the national cultural heritage database. Iraq, and especially the Erbil region, is developing rapidly, and such a database is critical if the nation's cultural heritage will be taken into consideration in planning decisions. Finally, the trauma of forced migration at the hands of the state is an experience in the living memory of nearly every adult Kurd in Iraq. By documenting the spatial impact of forced migration, ancient and modern, this project will promote the awareness of its geographic and social consequences.