Harvard professor talks about treasure trove of Kurdistani history

“I’ll be back there August. I have my team set up. I hope to have all of my Kurdish participants back again investigating the area in the direction of Kirkuk south of Erbil where we’ve been able to identify several hundred archeological sites. We’re hoping to visit them and continue to draw this picture of the history of the Erbil plain.” — Jason Ur, PhD, Harvard Professor of Anthropology

 

Since 2012, Ur has directs the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey (EPAS). He has previously worked in the Kurdish areas of Iraq, Turkey and Syria and he describes the Erbil Plains as a "treasure trove" in his previous reports. He and his team specialize in using declassified spy imagery to identify possible archaeological sites — some 8,000 years old.

 

On his visits, Ur has been working with local students and Mala Awat, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) director of antiquities, as well as the Erbil Directorate of Antiquities, which is involved with the preservation and documentation of the Hewler Qalat (the citadel in Erbil), considered to be one of the oldest continuously-inhabited places on Earth.

 

When and where have you done most of your work before in Kurdistan?

 

I have this research project that has been running in Kurdistan and Erbil since 2012. We’re doing a survey; it’s not excavation, which is what you usually think of when you think of archeology. But we’re mapping all archeological sites in the region of Erbil. We’re looking at an area that’s about 45 kilometers in about every direction from Erbil and we’re attempting to make a complete map of all

archeological sites or cultural heritage places within that area. The ultimate goal is to be able to trace the history in the area. We’re especially interested in how cities came to form on the plain and especially the impact of the Assyrian empire. The Erbil Plain was really the core of the Assyrian empire about 3,000 years ago.

 

Are you planning to come back to the Kurdistan Region anytime soon? Do you have any projects in the works?

 

I plan to come back every year in the future. My field project starts in the middle of August.  We work for about 6 weeks from the middle of August until the end of September. This is a good time to do this sort of work because there are no crops on the ground, so

we can visit archeological sites without damaging the local people’s fields which is their economic basis. So we can work easily in mapping the surface remains of these archeological sites, the artifacts that we find on the surface. And in this late summer, early fall time we can do this well.

 

Can you talk about the project, who is involved, what universities they were from?

 

EPAS is the name of his project funded by Harvard and the NSF [National Science Foundation in the United States] but it is a very international, multi-disciplinary project. In addition to colleagues from Kurdistan, we also have team members from France, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and the UK. Very often, I’m the only American out there.

 

This area has been described as a treasure trove for archeologists. Can you elaborate on that? Is it because it was a country so shut off by Saddam or at other times?

 

Well, that’s one of the reasons. Archeological research in the Kurdistan region was really neglected, if not suppressed under the Baathist regime because the history and archeology of the north was not perceived as being important. Iraqi history was Sumerian history. It was defined by the region to the south. That was the important part of Iraq. So as a result, the Kurdistan region was largely unknown. So the fact that we know anything about it, it’s exciting. We really didn’t know very much. But what’s shocked me

is just how many archeological sites there are. I was expecting to find a lot of sites that nobody knew about because of this negligence, but it’s proved to be one of the most important archeological landscapes in the near east that I’m aware of. It’s about one site per square kilometer on the Erbil plain, which is much, much higher than anything I’ve seen elsewhere in Syria or in southern Iraq.

 

 

There were reports of Turkish authorities moving a statue because of a dam project. What are your thoughts on it?

 

Yes, from the Tigris River, this is a dam that’s going to flood the medieval city of Hasankeyf and hundreds of other archeological sites. I was working in this region from 2007 until 2011 and I decided that I didn’t want to be a participant in the destruction of cultural heritage so that’s one of the reasons why I left and came to Erbil.

 

Do you think the mountainous areas would also be a treasure trove?

I suspect so. We have a contract for an area around Erbil that includes some hilly areas. At this point in our project, we are really focusing on these flat areas, but we are going to eventually make it up into those hills. It involves a different set of questions and a different set of methods so this is going to be a future direction for us. And I suspect given what we know about Shanadar Cave and the work done on the very early Neolithic sites in the region, I suspect that when we get up into these hills of Erbil, that we’ll also find some amazing results.

 

Do you also have a partnership with the Iraqi Institute for the Conservation of Antiquities and Heritage?

That’s right. I’ve participated in a couple of courses that they’ve offered as an instructor and I’ve begun to use its graduates as team members. Its graduates, we call them students but they’re not really students, they’re already cultural heritage professionals when they take the coursework in the institute. But they come out with new skill sets that are really useful for our project. For example, I had four archeologists from Kurdistan and they were all graduates from a course at the institute.

 

Was Makhmour previously inaccessible before Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces were able to recently secure this area?

 

Well, the plain around Mahkmour was investigated very briefly by British archeologists almost 100 years ago but with the exception of some German work in the Tigris valley, nobody’s really known anything about it. It’s not an area that the authorities in Baghdad encourage foreigners to go so it was generally not accessible. Mahkmour plain continues to be very dangerous. Our project goes along the hills between Erbil and Mahkmour and that’s the formal boundary of the Kurdistan Region, my project doesn’t go beyond that.

 

The sites that we have found on the Erbil plains are about 8,000 years old. So this has been an important place for humanity for a long, long time. And I expect it’s much older than that but we’ve been looking mostly on the plain to the southwest of Erbil and this is an agricultural area, and probably the earlier …  and we’d have to go up the hills to find evidence for that. We haven’t done that yet, but we will.

 

The Great Zab River near Kalak in the Kurdistan Region this spring. Photo: Chris Johannes

 

What have you found that has indicated that it’s 8,000 years old?

 

Well, we know from excavations and earlier work in Iraq and especially northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey, we know something about the history of artifacts. We’re not doing radio carbon dating. We are working with the artifacts that we find on the surface. But other archeologists have excavated sites and they’ve found styles of ceramics, types of tools, that they can date by

association by radio carbon dates. If I find identical types of pottery somewhere else, I can assume that it’s the same date because it’s the same style. So when we find a particular red painted style of ceramics on the surface, we know from other excavations that this is other 8,000-year-old style. That’s how we date the archeological sites, due to association.

 

Professor Ur's team uses declassified US intelligence images from 50 years ago to search for suitable survey sites.

Declassified CORONA images from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) - when did these become public and why are they valuable?

 

These declassified spy satellite photos become our primary way of finding archeological sites in the first place. Lots of archeologists use satellite imagery but the imagery you’d see on Google Earth for example tends not to be useful for us because Google Earth, Google Maps like to have info in the summer when there’s no clouds but it’s very dry and everything is brown. And also these are modern images. These are images that have all been taken in the last 5-10 years and the modern landscape is damaged. Erbil has been developing rapidly and they’re not too helpful. These declassified CORONA images taken in the late 1960’s take place before a lot of the development that has taken place since say 2005 in Erbil.

 

And they’re like a time machine back to a time where it wasn’t quite so damaged by plowing, by development. And we’ve also been able to find images from exactly the right time of year from the rainy season from the end of January to the end of February when the ground has got some moisture in it and the archeological sediments are much lighter than the soil that surrounds them so they

stand out like these big white blobs so we can find them from these images and then our second task is to go to Erbil with our GPSs [global position systems], our GIS [geographic information system] equipment and we visit these places to confirm that they are what we think they are. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we find something that turns out to be absolutely nothing, but we’re right about three-quarters of the time. It’s a very powerful tool for us.

 

In the Middle East it’s been very chaotic, especially in this region in the past decade since the invasion and even before that there’s been conflict. When you come across artifacts, is there an effort to preserve and is that being done locally or internationally?

 

In the Kurdistan Region, preservation has to be done locally. I’m very interested in the cultural heritage but I’m a foreigner there. I’m not a decision maker about what gets protected and what doesn’t get protected. Now obviously, I feel these places are valuable for the cultural heritage of the Kurdistan Region but also the cultural heritage of the world.  But I’m not the decision maker. The

decision makers are the people in Baghdad but especially Erbil. It’s the National Directorate of Antiquities of Erbil that needs to decide what’s valuable and what needs to be protected. It’s not possible to protect everything. It’s simply too much. And Erbil is growing too quickly but it’s up to my colleagues there to decide what should be protected and my job is to give my colleagues the information that they need to make those decisions. I don’t make decisions, they do, but I give them this information and my hope is that they’ll coordinate with the plain to make smart development decisions. 

 

How did you get interested in Kurdish archeology? Why did you stumble upon this and not someone else?

 

A couple of years ago I had this epiphany where I realized that… you know I was working in Turkey, and I had come to work in Turkey from working in Syria and I realized that I have always worked in Kurdistan it’s just that I have worked in Syria Kurdistan and then I was working in Turkish Kurdistan and I decided that I might as well go to the only place that I can actually say the word “Kurdistan” and that is the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. My expertise has always been in the hearts of the regions that are populated by Kurdish people. So for me I’ve been moving within Kurdistan for about 15 years now. I’m just jumping over international borders but I’ve always worked in Kurdistan.