Remote Sensing of Ancient Mesopotamian Settlement Systems

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。在国家科学基金会的支持下，伊丽莎白·斯通博士将探索与古代美索不达米亚有关的定居点的组织，那里是第一个已知的复杂社会的发展。 数字地球仪公司提供的商业卫星图像具有足够高的分辨率，可以记录地下泥砖建筑的痕迹。 在理想的情况下，可以看到整个城市、城镇和村庄的规划。 墙壁和房间填充物的差异干燥，无论是在雨后还是由于灌溉的水分渗透到场地内，都会产生建筑痕迹，使之成为可能。 因此，该项目有两个目标。 一是更好地了解降雨量、灌溉和遗址高度之间的关系，从而形成清晰可见的地表痕迹;二是获取图像和绘制遍布冲积层的各种规模的遗址地图，其日期为公元前5，000年至公元前1年。 挖掘出的公共建筑将首次被纳入整个聚落的平面图中，并可以在大城市和小村庄的组织之间进行比较。这些建筑平面图可以用来回答与集中特征（如宫殿和其他公共建筑-寺庙，港口，仓储设施，防御工事等-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不同的定居点？ 有什么证据表明定居点的集中规划？ 是否有些定居点有饲养家畜的设施，而其他定居点没有？ 这些问题对于解决一个长期存在的争论至关重要，这个争论是关于最早的复杂社会是否建立在对大量人口的广泛剥削的基础上，或者社会流动性和更多的公共决策是否至少同样重要。这个项目的智力价值在于它将为城市的空间组织提供无与伦比的洞察力，构成世界上最早文明的城镇和村庄。人类学家开发了各种各样的方法来理解早期复杂社会的发展，这些方法已经在相对较小的地区进行了挖掘，这些地区通常位于每个文明的较大遗址内，并针对早期发展阶段。相比之下，本项目将对定居社会的所有要素进行更大和更广泛的数据抽样，审查城市和农村地点，并涵盖五千年的发展。 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前所未有的考古遗址掠夺之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现场保护。 从长远来看，我们的数据将使伊拉克或外国的考古学家能够选择调查地点，并在这些地点内选择挖掘区域。 此外，识别有用图像的方法应该适用于其他地理区域，例如埃及，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.