Fieldwork Report: Victoria Wilson - American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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On the Street Where You Lived: Household Archaeology at Kurd Qaburstan

Victoria Wilson, 2024 Strange-Midkiff Fieldwork Scholarship Recipient

I spent my summer in a hole in a barley field in Iraq.

First, some background on the project that brought me to said field: Kurd Qaburstan is a fortified urban site located in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and suspected of being the ancient site of Qabra, a regional capital on the Erbil Plain during the Middle Bronze Age.

Excavations began in 2013 and as the project progressed multiple monumental buildings have been detected through magnetometry and explored through excavation: most notably being a temple and palace. In 2014, magnetometry identified a concentration of agglutinated architecture in the northwest sector of the site.

With the layout displaying similarities to other domestic areas in the ancient Near East, this sector became known as the Northwest Neighborhoods. Magnetometry data could further show the streets that divided the blocks of architecture, and one of these city blocks has become the focus of my dissertation.

Now we can go back to the holes in the barley field. Or to describe my scholarly efforts less glibly: I spent this field season supervising three trenches in the Northwest Neighborhoods, investigating domestic contexts to better our understanding of the lifeways of these ancient urbanites. While my goal for the season had been to practice household archaeology in the most literal sense –peering into the interior of a house –two of the trenches missed the mark slightly and had us examining a domestic exterior space: a expansive pebble surface that was likely part of a courtyard.

Near the tail-end of the season we reexamined the magnetometry data and opened a new trench just north of the initial two trenches that would place us within the walls of the structure. Right at the end of the season one of those walls was found and so the 2025 season will see us explore the structure further.

While in the trenches one can easily lose sight of the larger goals of a project: in the blazing Middle Eastern heat, the stress of juggling paperwork and strategizing data collection, the macro goals of investigating neighborhood dynamics and city planning can melt away. But as they say: it’s the little things in life –and in this case it was a little ceramic fish that helped me refocus on the human aspect of my investigations.

When it was pulled from what was known informally as the “pottery volcano” (which could be an upper floor collapse or trash deposition – the jury is still out on the most likely interpretation) it was just an oddly shaped hollow ceramic object. Personally, I thought it might be a pig when I first held it due to the “snout.” The local museum conservator, Nihayat, could immediately tell there was paint underneath the encrusted dirt. After the object was cleaned and conserved it was revealed to be part of a fish-shaped juglet.

This is an object that had been created with a personal touch over 3,000 years ago. Found among a large utilitarian domestic assemblage that needed to be recorded and quantified, the fish juglet reminded me that this collection had once been more than a data point for a dissertation buthad once belonged to people who had crafteditand kept it in their homes until its eventual deposition. Where now there were holes in a modern barley field, there had once been a courtyard nestled in a neighborhood, which was itself part of the urban landscape that was ancient Qabra.

Ceramic fish after cleaning and conservation

Group photo by the trenches. (Photo courtesy of The Kurd Qaburstan Project).

Victoria Wilson is a PhD candidate in the Department Near Eastern Studies at the Johns Hopkins University studying Mesopotamian Archaeology. Victoria’s research interests include urbanism and household archaeology.