language
En Ku Ar

Image Title calendar2024-01-11

Darband-i Rania Archaeological Project, with an area in excess of 70 ha a special interest in the first millennium BC

Darband-i Rania Archaeological Project the Darband-i Rania Archaeological Project was a project directed by Dr. John MacGinnis of the British Museum, carried out in co-operation with the General Director of Antiquities of Kurdistan, the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage of Raparin and the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage of Slemani.

Image Title calendar2025-01-17

Halaf and Late Chalcolithic occupations at Shakar Tepe in the Shahrizor Plain, Iraqi Kurdistan: Preliminary report of the 2023 excavations

The Shahrizor Plain is one of the ideal fields for tracking the transition from Neolithic village life in the Fertile Crescent to Urbanisation which occurred in Mesopotamia because of its geographical location connecting the mountainside valleys along the Zagros and the downstream Diyala River that flows into the Tigris. Our field project aims to obtain archaeological materials to unveil this process. Following the first excavations at Shakar Tepe conducted in 2019, we excavated two additional areas at this site in 2023, including one of the three satellite mounds that were newly identified around the main mound. The cultural remains of the Late Halaf settlement uncovered from Operation B at Shakar Tepe II date back to approximately 5600–5400 calBC. On the other hand, Operation C at Shakar Tepe I yielded a thick deposit of the Late Chalcolithic occupations dated to ca. 3800–3600 calBC. The recovered materials fill the time ranges in the late prehistoric chronology of the site and will contribute to our understanding of the historical role of this region in the transition from Neolithisation to Urbanisation.

Image Title calendar2024-01-11

Surveying Dukan Lake

The latest archaeological activity is the survey of some of the archaeological Sites in Dukan Lake. It is a joint work between the Archeology and heritage Directorates (Slemani, Raperin and Pisa University) of Italy.

In the land of the highlanders: from the kingdom of Simurrum to Mazamua in the Shahrizor

Article Name

In the late third and early second millennium bc,  the large plain known today as the Shahrizor and  its surrounding region, located in the province of  Suleymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, likely formed an  important region of the kingdom of Simurrum (Fig. 31.1; Altaweel et al. 2012). For much of the remaining second millennium bc and into the first two centuries of the irst millennium bc, the region was a contested border zone between northern and southern Mesopotamian kingdoms or became splintered into small kingdoms.

In 842 bc, the region became incorporated into the Assyrian provincial system under Shalmaneser III and remained part of the province of Mazamua until the fall of the Assyrian empire in the  late seventh century bc.

As archaeologists are now  embarking on projects in Iraqi Kurdistan, one major question that will certainly arise is how do setlements in the region transform in one period to the next under varying political and economic circumstances. While archaeological surveys will be critical in illing this knowledge gap, computational methods can be used to determine where major setlements should be generally located and what factors might cause deviations from expectations. When there are known historical shifts, such as during the Neo-Assyrian (NA) period, the same model is able to evaluate how setlement size hierarchies transform. This paper presents such a method and demonstrates how major sites, such as Yasin Tepe and Bakr Awa, could arise, while also presenting a method for assessing how sites transform between minor and major setlements and the interactions that enable such transformations.