 I'm Christine Hastert, the director of the Archaeological Research Facility, and I want to invite you all here. This is our spring lecture. We have two lectures a year, one in the fall and one in the spring, where we try to bring a distinguished scholar in to speak to us and share their cogent information. And today's lecture, as you will see and hear very soon, is about the greater Near Eastern, so I wanted to also mention right at the beginning, which you saw in the posters, that this is co-sponsored by the Near Eastern Studies Department here on campus and also the Bade Museum of Biblical Archaeology and GTU. But before we turn to today's lecture, I want to remind people of a series of workshops on equipment and methods that we do here at the Archaeological Research Facility, beginning with tomorrow's event, which is also posted up outside the 3D laser scanning, imaging, and virtual reality for cultural heritage and archaeology. That's one to three, and that's going to be right in this room with all kinds of mod-cons and trying it out yourself with a team of people, including Ruth Traylon. No, no, I know my surrogate. Your surrogate? Okay, well, in spirit, Ruth will be here. And also, I hope you don't mind, but I thought for those of you who want to hear about our workshops and programs and regular weekly lectures, we're going to pass this sheet where you can sign up if you were here today, and if you want to receive anything, put your email down, and we will put you on the list, and you will receive information as we go along. You can sign it later if you want. So if you want to start that, thank you. Okay, so we at ARF and I especially am pleased to have Dr. Professor Jason Burr here for our spring lecture. He is a professor in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University and is also the director of the Center for Geographic Analysis there, linking nice things with this week's series of workshops and presentations on Berkeley, including the workshop tomorrow. Dr. Burr has been active archaeologist since 1993, receiving his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD from the University of Chicago, where he has completed research across the greater Western Asia, and here we go. From a CV, Yemen, Egypt, correct me if I'm wrong, Jordan, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and there's probably someone missing. So I think it's safe to say from all over. Primarily completing a survey, completing a lot of geographical information, and also excavation, so the full spectrum of scholarship. Since 2012, he has directed the Erbil Plain Archaeological Survey, EES, which isn't up there, but I'm guessing we're going to hear about it today. You're going to hear about it. Located in the Erbil Governorate in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, and we're all, I'm especially looking forward to that. He is published regularly on his fieldwork with a special focus on early urbanism, illustrated in his 2010 book, Urbanism and Cultural Landscapes in North Eastern Syria, to tell Hamar Kar survey, and I'm guessing he's not even going back there now, so it's really good to have that data. And a current manuscript, another manuscript more on his broader interest, that is the evolution of Mesopotamian cities. So those of us who have an interest in the rise of urbanism and the engagement of rural and urban, this is going to be a special treat for us today. It's a thought and written about the role also of households. That is the small scale in these urban settings in the developing urbanism, illustrated in a series of publications. To name a few, he's published in the Near Eastern Archaeology, Norwegian Archaeological Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleo-oriented, Zubartu Journal of Iranian Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Research, Iraq, Antiquity and Akkadia, and more, but those are the only ones I've written down. But I do want to highlight just one article that I have found particularly engaging, that was published in the Cambridge Archaeological, in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal that illustrates a reassessment of the place of households and lineages in these early urban settings. He proposes a new model for urbanism in that region and places households in the growth of lineages and households in the central location, as opposed to being altered and peripheral by the top-down models that we're so used to reading about from that region. So in that respect, he's proposing a family or household structure extending out across all aspects of communication and production, building on local, long-lived, indigenous historical models of communication and production, forming out of his use of a house society model. Households were durable, long-lived, productive units there, and I'm assuming continue to be so today in the region. He calls them public households, some of these groups that ended up communities that are sitting here. They seem particularly stable, thank you very much. Placing kinship and lineage relations at the center of political development, urbanism and political hierarchy, which I think is an interesting thing to think about for us even today in our world. So I'm not going to say anything more. I'm going to let him do the talking and we're going to turn to his landscape-oriented research, at least to begin with, as you can see from the photo behind me. And I hope you'll appreciate and welcome Dr. Jason Ortt-Arff with the Imperial Landscape of Syria from the ground and above. Christine, thank you and the ARF for inviting me to speak here. I always get a little bit embarrassed by these introductions, but I love this one in particular because to my knowledge, the first person that's read my Cambridge Archaeological Journal article and you gave enough of a description beyond the abstract that I believe that you actually read it. So it's a thrill to be here. I haven't been in this part of the Bay Area in, I think, about 28 years. I went to high school in San Ramon, which I think is somewhere over there on the other side of the hills, and all of the smart kids from my high school went to Berkeley and I got second semester admission and I didn't end up coming here. So this is where I was supposed to be 28 years ago, but I didn't quite make it until now. So this is kind of an honor to be here. I am also happy to be here talking about ancient Assyria. I wondered if the esteemed Professor Stronach, whether I would see him, and he is in fact here. So I'm coming to speak about Assyria in a place that I associate with some of the best research on ancient Assyria, but from a radically different perspective and a radically different scale. So I, as Christine mentioned, I'm interested in the past from a landscape perspective. I'm interested in questions that you can't really answer by digging a hole in the ground, no matter how big that hole is. And this has caused me to realize that I can't answer these questions on the ground. There are just some things that are, some phenomena that are too big really to be approached with your feet pegged to the ground. You have to go up. And so I'm going to talk a little bit about how I've addressed a particularly interesting question on the structure of imperial landscapes, especially using methods that involve kind of a remote perspective. So briefly, in terms of the way I approach my questions, I'm really interested in how landscapes came to have their structure, how social forces, environmental forces might have encouraged particular directions of development, maybe dissuaded other particular adaptations, and how we as archaeologists can kind of approach this, especially when we're dealing with landscapes that have been occupied for a long time. If I'm interested in early Bronze Age landscapes, that's great, but I do have to deal with the Iron Age and the classical period, and in this part of the world, the Islamic period, and there's nothing short of a time machine that allows me to not pay attention to all of these different subsequent historical phases, which can really cause, really make for some challenges. I found it useful to kind of approach landscapes from two different perspectives, emergent and imposed, which you can also think of as bottom-up or top-down. I think a lot of my colleagues in the ancient Near East, we tend to think from a top-down perspective. Perhaps we're a little over-influenced by the Royal Inscriptions or the legend of Gilgamesh, the great builder of Uruk. We tend to think of cities and even landscapes as being, as taking their structure kind of from the perspective of grand planners, powerful kings that could cause landscapes to take a particular shape. And a good modern analogy is this is Hamadan in Western Iran where a perfectly organic city had a lovely kind of Hausman-esque Parisian set of boulevards blasted through it. This is a clear case where one or a couple of designers decided that this particular landscape was going to have this form and they had the power to make this happen. My colleagues see this a lot. I have a tendency, I have strongly suspected that most of what we're seeing is largely emergent. It can be highly structured like something like Hamadan, but it doesn't require sort of a central planner, a intelligent designer is another way of putting it, or a landscape to get this form. And I've given you here a photo of a marsh village in the south of Iraq where I think if you look you can see structure, you can see buildings that all are more or less oriented in the same way. They're evenly spaced, they sit on reclaimed land in the marshes that's roughly the same size. But nobody told them that your building has to be oriented this way or you have to be X meters from your neighbors. And this is an emergent property of commonly held ideas about the proper way to build a house, be connected to your neighbor or not connected to your neighbor that without anybody telling you, kind of emerges to create a very structured form, in this case the marsh village. Now you can put these on opposite ends of a continuum from, you know, hyper designed and I'm a big fan of the Eisenhower interstate highway system for that reason to emergent very complete terrace landscapes in Yemen is a good example. You can put those on a continuum. Of course no landscape that we're going to be able to find is really going to be one or the other. Everything kind of exists as a combination of imposed structures and emergent. But this is an interesting question to try to tease out to what extent were individuals responsible for their landscape or was it large planners? The ancient Near East, the Middle East general is a great place to ask these sorts of questions for a handful of reasons. For one, the sites, can anybody not see the archeological site in that picture? Highly obtrusive, really easy to find on the ground and especially from space also with high visibility of artifacts. In a landscape that's been deforested since the start of the Neolithic. So landscape archeology is easy here. Also early social complexity shows up really early so there's been a long time for landscapes to take interesting forms to be studied. And the Middle East has been historically underdeveloped and this really has continued right up to the end of the 21st century still continues for large parts of the Middle East. So I can ask questions of my landscapes in the Middle East that would be impossible to answer in, for example, Europe or North America where 20th century urbanization and development has just overwhelmed the kind of fragile elements of landscape that I would love to study. So after my early career of studying early cities, as Christine mentioned, that I ultimately concluded were largely bottom-up emergent products of individuals despite the boasts of early royal inscriptions. I have decided in the last five years that I want to really look closely at the other end of that spectrum. I want to see if there really are such a thing as early imposed landscapes and if anything could do this it would be imperial political constellations. So I've turned to the Assyrian Empire as a good test case to do this. Let me say a little bit, I know there's some experts on Assyria in this room and there may be some of you who have no idea of what I'm talking about with Assyria so a little bit of background here. Starting at the beginning of the 1st millennium BC the Assyrian state which had been kind of concentrated in this northern part of Iraq here expanded out and ultimately by here at 720 at one of the real heights of the empire. It encompassed almost all of the moderns Republic of Iraq, large parts of western Iran, big, big parts of Syria and southeastern Turkey and extending down into the Levant. In some places it went beyond this, never for very long, but certainly the largest political entity that had existed up until that time. Centered on the homeland in the northern part of Iraq. A series of capital cities along the Tigris River starting at Asher, the ancestral and religious capital from which we get Assyria. And slowly, with time moving the capital up the Tigris, so the capital then moved to Calhoun, which you may know as Nimrud, and ultimately to its ultimate location at Nineveh. Nineveh being the royal foundation of one of the great Biblical bad guys, Sennacherib, probably a guy who deserved this reputation. But this area is generally referred to as the Assyrian Triangle because it includes the city of Erbil, the modern and ancient city of Erbil off to one side giving it a kind of a triangular shape. And this is really the historical core of the Assyrian Empire. So in starting this project I had an idea that I might be looking at a very structured landscape of some kind of elements that caused me to believe that this might be the case. So for one we have unbelievably large planned capital cities starting from the beginning but culminating, as I mentioned, in the great city of Nineveh right here where you can see the Citadel area but a vast walled area encompassing about 750 hectares. This was the largest city on the planet at the time and clearly very engineered. This is the place from which a lot of the famous Assyrian reliefs that you'll see in the British Museum come from very strong focus on the elite aspects of the city by early archaeologists. Professor Stronach was poised to break that monopoly of the elite on archaeological research by doing some work especially here and at gates on the southern end of the city. One of the many tragedies of the first Gulf War was the cessation of this project which was really poised to finally give us some understanding of the way the structure of a city worked. So cities, also hydrology, nearly the entire landscape behind the city of Nineveh had been transformed by canals, dams, and even aqueducts. This is the aqueduct at Jerwan. So that water was redirected most often in the direction, from these hills back here and in the direction of Nineveh. There is evidence that there was a demographic transition in this landscape as well. Surveys in an adjacent region have shown an unbelievably even scatter of villages across the landscape, almost like somebody had deliberately decided that we were going to put even small villages fully across the landscape a very, very artificial pattern of settlement. I'll come back to what this rural colonization might mean in just a moment. And then there's good evidence that there was an ideological stamp placed on this. Throughout this landscape there were monuments showing the kings being handed the divine symbols of legitimacy that anybody that saw this would know that the king was legitimate. And these things were tied together. So this rock relief, shown here with the great archaeologist Austin Henry Layard being lowered down onto it, this sat at this point right here at the head of a dam which took water about 95 kilometers from the mountains on the fringes of Assyria to the capital city at Nineveh. So really all tied together, this suggests that there was possibly a really strong design for what the Assyrian landscape should look like. Exactly the kind of top-down landscape that I proposed to study. But back to that demographic engineering element of this. This might show up in the Bible. There are passages in the historical books that talk about how the Assyrian kings not only conquered biblical lands but took its population away and took it back to Assyria. If you're a biblical person you may probably associate this with the Canesar and other later kings as well. But the Assyrians got a good head start on this. And it even shows up in the palaces. You're looking here at a relief from the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh showing the Assyrian army leading away these deportees. And here's a man kind of being let off with his wife and children on a chariot with their belongings being taken away to exile back to Assyria. And the Assyrian kings also make very similar claims. It's a bit odd for the victims and the victors to largely tell the same story but you get that here where you have royal inscriptions in this case of Sennacherib himself describing conquest and then talking about taking away 200,150 people and their animals and possessions and moving them back to Assyria. So there's a lot of evidence for the possibility that there could be this very deliberate demographic engineering in the core. But I have kind of an attitude towards royal inscriptions and how they should be treated as historical sources. I mean, the Bible has problems as well, but royal inscriptions tell us far more about what people at the time were intended to think about their worlds than some historical document that they or we 3,000 years later could take as actual fact. So here's where I felt that a landscape archaeology project could kind of come to bear to evaluate these claims that we see in royal inscriptions. So that's what took me here. Now this is a rock we're talking about and so I'm going to give you a little bit of background on Iraq itself showing you a series of slides that I initially drafted to show my mom and my wife as I was proposing to start field work in the Republic of Iraq. So Iraq is a complicated place as I'm sure most of you are aware. It is ethnically very diverse with Shia Arabs in the south, Sunni mostly in the north and the west, and then of course on the fringes of the Zagros you have Kurds who are mostly Sunni but largely take their identity from their ethnicity as opposed to their religion. In 1970 the government of Iraq declared unilaterally that there would be a Kurdistan Autonomous Region defined by these three northern provinces and then the government began to push Kurds into this area out of other areas especially oil rich areas that they were more interested in having Arabs in. And this was the situation up until 1991 when the Iraqi army left the Kurdistan region and the Kurds sort of formed themselves into kind of a de facto state within the state and sort of pushed their boundaries about to what you see here. And this was the situation up until about 2003 with the Kurds largely autonomous within this area which brings us to the humanitarian crisis of the second Gulf War, the American invasion of 2003 which produced about 109,000 deaths according to U.S. government information that was leaked via WikiLeaks. Information that all has very precise latitude and longitude attached to it so if you're kind of a geography nerd like me you can really vividly display this. These are points but it's maybe a little bit easier to see here this is a ratio of deaths per 100 square kilometers. Obviously Baghdad a very dangerous place but also Mosul and Kirkuk and Basra. This is up to 2007 but then after the surge violence really was reduced. Still a very, very dangerous place but far less violent than it had been before and here's the slide for my mom. The Kurdistan region was almost completely outside of that so this is the modern political context that started my own work and got authorization from mom and wife and Harvard lawyers. So that's kind of the modern geopolitical context. The intellectual context is that this is a radically understudied region of an otherwise very well surveyed part of the world. Iraq is the home of some of the most foundational archaeological surveys in the world. The yellow areas that you see here in the south of Iraq are the surveys of Bob Adams, Robert McCormick Adams and his students and colleagues done largely in the 60s and the 70s and these were foundational for the way we think of archaeological survey. Starting in the late 80s and into the 90s there was another set of surveys done largely outside of Iraq, much more intense smaller areas and more intensive. These were largely done by Wilkinson, Tony Wilkinson and his students and I'm one of those. But you'll notice a very large gap in research in the north of Iraq including that kind of core area of the Assyrian Empire that Assyrian Triangle that I showed you before. So with the stability of the Kurdistan region falling in which encompasses a large part of that imperial core I proposed to do a survey in the area around the Kurdish capital of Erbil starting in 2012 and they gave me an obscene kind of neocolonial 3,200 square kilometer survey area. There's not very many places in the Middle East where an American can get that. And since then almost all of Kurdistan is now under survey by archaeologists and so this rapidly is going to fill in. So largely because of my largely because of Nikotripsovic I associate Berkeley and ARF with super high end methodological work especially geospatial work. So I'm going to spend some time talking about what we do in the field. A little bit different from the way Nikko operates but you know I'm trying. So our field methods are I think very important in how we approach a landscape of this vast scale. We're surveying an imperial core and of it to survey. So we're heavily based on archaeological remote sensing. When I talked I've often had colleagues come up to me saying you know Jason I know you're into this remote sensing thing but I got a satellite image and it didn't work. And of course immediately that makes me say well when was it taken? Was it old? Was it new? Was it in the spring or the fall? I mean there's no one image. You can have a lovely image. This is the city of the Syrian capital of Nimrud one of the earlier capitals showing the citadel and the city wall here. A little bit of an irrigation canal that fed the city. But this is taken in August. This is really dry and you can't see anything. But if you turn to March which is a wetter time of year this is a color image from 2011. You can see a lot more of that canal. You can see some hints in this discoloration in these green areas. There's more there. You can see more going on under these modern fields. But if you have both age and the right time of year this is an image from February of 1967. Not only can you see that entire irrigation that canal coming up to the city but you can even see processional ways going through the fabric of the city. So this is an image that has historical depth and it has exactly the kind of right seasonality and moisture. So this is the sort of thing that we're trying to use a lot to be able to identify sites and features in this area. So historical imagery has become really big. Modern imagery is great. It can show you things that go beyond what the human eye can see but it shows you the modern landscape. And even in an underdeveloped place like Iraq there's still a lot of development that has badly damaged landscapes in the late 20th century. So I have made a lot of use out of declassified intelligence imagery first from the corona program which ran up until the month after I was born was the last flight. More recently this is available via the USGS on the Earth Explorer website to anybody. It's a wonderful example of government openness. This declassification. More recently the successor program called Hexagon was declassified. Unfortunately we don't make film anymore. Apparently we've moved to a post-film world so the National Archives didn't have enough film to give a copy to the USGS. For Hexagon you have to go to a small room in College Park, Maryland to see this stuff. And I've stumbled upon the U2 spy plane mission going all the way back to the 1950s so we're making some use of this. This stuff is almost impossible to find without a very strange man who has completely hacked this system came and found me and I follow him into the National Archives and I've been able to find some U2 imagery here. But this historical imagery has been absolutely fantastic for finding archaeological sites and landscapes in this really vast region that we've proposed to study. So here's an example of a walled Assyrian city. This is the modern name of this place is Kasser Shamamik. This was ancient Khilizu and this was a provincial capital just to the west of Erbil where you can see very clear citadel and wall and that shows up both in this historical U2 imagery and the Corona and the Hexagana and very clearly in the modern commercial GOI image. But what you... it doesn't take high resolution satellite imagery to find a 50 hectare walled Assyrian city. However, look at this little bit down here, okay, that had never been recognized before. If I could pull out a little bit on this image there are dozens of small blobs like that within maybe three kilometers of this city that would otherwise be extremely difficult to find without very painstaking walking transects. So sitting in my air conditioned office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I identified about 1600 archaeological sites, potential archaeological sites and historical sources in our 3,200 square kilometer area here and to give you some context here this is the capital of... the Assyrian capital city of Nimrud. Here is Mosul and Nineveh. Here is Erbil and this is this area that we're surveying. So 1600 archaeological sites viewed from space. Now obviously not all these are going to be Assyrian. We have to go to the ground to find them. The most famous archaeological site in this region is of course Erbil itself. It's a modern, thriving modern city but it also was an important ancient city. Very important in the Assyrian Empire and it may be a little bit hard to get a sense of scale but that's about a 30 meter high mound. I think you can see this fringe around it. It has continued to be occupied. This is probably what Mesopotamian mounded sites looked like at the time they were settled. Erbil is nearly unique in that it continues has continued to have people living on top of it and right up until the present. Unfortunately the modern city of Erbil this is 1938 it now extends almost as far as you can see here but really a glorious archaeological site unfortunately under a modern town. More typical of archaeological sites in the area is this a small maybe half hectare mound and we know right where these are because we've identified them from the satellite imagery and we can go right to them. We're not doing transect walking. We are entirely digital so until very recently I had a very expensive Trimble GPS handheld computer running the ArcPad software for the geospatial nerds in the audience here. This was okay. It wasn't the greatest interface when I would show my Kurdish colleagues this they would try to tap the screen and pinch and zoom in and out and of course this is not something that you can do on Windows Mobile. We did this until last season when we had some kind of revolutionary new additions to our field kit and this is something that I'd highlight in a technologically savvy audience. We've begun to use drones and this has been revolutionary not because we're the first people to use drones probably we're about the last people to use drones but it's become revolutionary because you no longer have to be a Nikotripsovic to do this. You can be a kind of a thick headed person like me and buy one off the shelf by download software and get a reasonable product without being kind of a technological leader in this. It has become a tool that anybody can use so it is now something that we use not just on the odd interesting site but we use it on every site at this point. So we have an interesting protocol we on day one the drone team goes out to fly an archaeological site that we intend to collect and there is now web based planning software where you literally draw a polygon around it and the software will calculate the best trajectory to get the three dimensional product that you want out of it. This is then something that we go to the field and fly and in the first season I did a little bit of flying myself because let's be honest this is really cool stuff it's fun to fly drones but very quickly I realized that this wasn't this is something that I could train others to do including Khalil a Kurdish archaeologist in Erbil who now does a hundred percent of our flying he is our drone team occasionally we have take your son to work day and his son Abdulrahman comes. This is great this my drone doesn't come home it lives in Erbil now so when I'm there it flies for our project but when I'm not it becomes a tool that the department of antiquities in Erbil runs for themself they can do all this stuff except the processing they send the images to me via Google Drive and I make the models and send it back but they're now doing this for their own purposes and this has been one of the best things I've ever done was to put this kind of technology into the hands of my local collaborators that evening we would take the image into processing software and we're using Esri's drone to map this takes the images and stitches them together into a really high resolution ortho photo but also terrain data which we can then use to plan how are we going to approach the surface collection of these places so here's a particularly complicated site with a mound that was occupied over several centuries and some lower areas surrounding it and some isolated bits in the past this is the kind of thing where I would show up and having being the sole proprietor of the geospatial data on my trimble unit I would have to tell people where to go now we can plan this out the night before with the drone data and then the next day we could go out to the field and collect it with great precision and again I no longer have to tell people you know your collection area is between that sheep carcass over there and that mud brick house now we can push this to the cloud and every single team member has 100% of our spatial data they don't need to know to stop at the dead cow and not go any further their GPS units and their mobile devices tell them and sometimes we can even give them the terrain that was captured two days prior and this has made our collection so hyper-efficient that we can really move at a speed that I think is starting to justify the Kurds allowing me to have 3,200 square kilometers of their cultural heritage and that's something that kind of I take very seriously so ultimately what we're trying to do is something like this we're trying to write site biographies of individual settlements you know here's an archaeological site that was occupied in eight different ceramic periods starting in the late 5th millennium continuing up to the Sasanian or late antique period and shifting its size and scale through time this is what we want to know we want to know how these places expanded and contracted through time but not just one of these places like all of our places and the drone imagery has also proven to be our best outreach tool to our local Kurdish the people that live in and around these archaeological sites the ability to send this up to a sharing site like this is you're looking at me interacting with Sketchfab here has really been the best way that we could possibly reach out to our Kurdish stakeholders also it's really just I still just think this is really cool to look at so what have we found now we have about six or seven thousand years of sedentary settlement in this area that I could tell you about but I'll focus on the Neo-Assyrian landscape because that's really what's been driving our work and especially driving this kind of question of what is the nature of this landscape is it really truly as engineered as we've hypothesized so in our four now four field seasons of survey let's make sure I get these numbers right so we found 516 sites we have about another thousand sites that we still need to visit before we're going to be finished we've collected about 55,000 pot sherds and typed about 13,000 of them so we're beginning to get a good picture of how these sites were settled or abandoned through time and we have about 87,000 photos out of the drone so we have an unbelievably in my opinion a staggeringly well documented landscape so far but we still have quite a bit left to do the thing that I'm most excited about the black dots that you see on this map are sites that we've collected and the blue areas are the areas that we've flown with the drone and this system has basically allowed us at this point to cover almost every single site so we've always measured area but I think we're getting to the point where a basic element of what we record about individual archaeological sites can be volume as well and sites that are made out of mud brick and they go through upwards through time volume is an important attribute that says something about the duration of ancient settlements in this area so we've certainly found that there are these large planned capital cities this was not really a surprise this is a terrain model of Kilesu Kassar Shamamik showing that in great detail this isn't something that we really needed to document this was something that was known I want to show this image just because it shows that these archaeological sites have had very interesting afterlives in the case of Kassar Shamamik at the time it was visited by Austin Henry Layard in the 1840s it had an Ottoman fort and we see a little bit of that there it was an Iraqi military post leading up to the first Gulf War and there you can see the trenches that the Iraqi army dug around it American planes flew over that base sometime at the beginning of the war and there's some lovely craters that look like you're on the surface of the moon those are American munitions and a French team has begun to excavate it and there you have some nice trenches and some spoil heaps and that's before we get down to the citadel with a known palace somewhere in there of King Sinakarab and a very large lower town with a still preserved very clear outer wall but exactly the sort of thing that we were expecting to see in some cases big urban planned areas but overwhelmingly what we see is just the opposite small rural sites in some cases so small that they're in danger of being obscured by a herd of a herd of goats and a surveyor but this is very typical of an Assyrian empire to a half hectare it's only maybe a meter or two high it probably has one or two periods one of which is Neo-Assyrian and we find loads of these at the scale of the region this is what the core of the Assyrian empire looked like in between the 900 and 600 BC to be very coarse very very full lots of small dots with the blue walled city that I just showed you lots of dots and a lot of them kind of far away from water not on the perennial water sources which is where people kind of like to live because people like water complicating this unlike the pattern that we'd seen elsewhere was the fact that we also discovered a late bronze age a middle Assyrian landscape that was already very full so our idea that we would look at the Assyrian core and it would just explode at the time of the Neo-Assyrian empire has been complicated by the fact that this was also the core of the middle Assyrian state which also turns out to have been pretty dense although not nearly as divorced from water as what we see at the time of the imperial height I'm not going to go into this boring graphic in too much detail but what you're seeing in the bars is the histogram of the numbers of sites through time from prehistoric up until Islamic period you'll notice one particular big spike right there that's the number of sites at the time of the Neo-Assyrian empire and you can see it's this massive explosion and the numbers of sites follow very closely by the late bronze age that preceded it and these truly are mostly little tiny small sites. In other areas on the fringes of the empire we saw very high densities in terms of sites per square kilometer ranging from 0.11 to 0.18 but the Urbill plane is even greater than that with about 0.22 in our latest measurement and uniformly very small at least as small as these other average sites in these other regions so the core is overwhelmingly defined by dense sites and very small exactly as we would expect to see and then there's the intervention in the landscape we found a series of extraordinarily big canals you're seeing here a natural water course that's flowing through the plane and then the drone video that you're looking at now is this giant canal that took off of it right here. For scale car there's Khalil flying the drone and you're looking at about a 100 meter wide 8 to 10 meter deep giant gash across this watershed this is not something that was undertaken by local villagers looking to increase their water supply this is the act of a state redirecting this natural water course to flow like this and ending in this bizarre basin about 300 meters across we don't have good absolute weighting on this feature yet but the sites that are closest to it are predominantly of this neosirian era so big canals on the plane but also some interesting small features as well I'll show you two features that are to the north of Erbil one is a subterranean channel that's been known for a long time but new information has come to light and then another is an area sort of along it that shows evidence for some smaller scale irrigation at this time so go first to this area in immediately to it on satellite imagery we found a lot of very faint lines running like this this is a natural drainage here this is another natural drainage here and a series of lines that suggesting small local off takes that are probably irrigating something like gardens maybe vineyards maybe orchards that are remarkably reminiscent of features that are known elsewhere to the north of a place called feta I got very excited when I saw this on the satellite imagery because they look just like this known place called feta which has reliefs on the side of it so I got very excited that we were going to find reliefs here and I was going to and finally my art historical colleagues would start to care about what I do for the first time ever unfortunately when we got there it was not the right kind of terrain it was far sort of gravelly but you can see here that canal kind of snaking its way across with the looming city of Erbil in the background so I didn't get my reliefs and my art historian colleagues still don't care anything about what I do but nonetheless again I don't have good dating evidence for this except that it looks just like the feta system which is known to be Assyrian but then going further to the north this was a very interesting discovery I didn't think of the drone as being a prospecting tool but here's a case where it turned out to be a tool for discovery and not just documentation this is an area where a tributary of the of the Tigers was flowing a place that had a known canal head this is a photo of this feature in the side of the hill until 1991 there was a cuneiform inscription on the top of this little cut stone opening that mentioned that King Sennacherib had dug this tunnel to guide water to the city of Erbil it was stolen in the aftermath of the first Gulf War but it had been copied so we know that this is the starting point to a subterranean channel that went about 23 kilometers to Erbil but what hadn't been appreciated was how water was fed into that we were interested to fly over this area to produce this lovely digital elevation model that you see here first and foremost because this is a threatened area the city of Erbil is growing through cement and cement comes from gravel and gravel miners had dug this out and they dug this out and we were afraid they were going to take away this feature so we flew it we got a digital elevation model and then we got this ortho photo that Khalil flew this when I wasn't there but when we took it back and we produced the model I saw this feature right here and if we zoom in on that this had been exposed by some rainfall earlier in the season and I think if you squint you can see that these stones they have a suspiciously straight line up there the the downslope or downstream edge is very clear a bit of damage from the mining on the upslope side and if you follow that that line right there there we follow it you can see that it goes it would go straight into the opening of that canal head so there was a dam here I don't know if it was to impound water or simply just to redirect it but this is 20 meters wide this is about the width this is maybe a little bit wider than this room is long this is massive and we have it for probably about 500 meters it continues in this direction this is exactly the kind of large scale landscape transformation that we were kind of hypothesizing that we would see in this case to feed water to the provincial capital at Erbil so my colleagues in now I will say that for me this lovely dash line more than enough to demonstrate this my Kurdish colleagues wanted to see more they trust me now but first they had to bring in a backhoe and expose that bloody thing so we now know that it in fact does what that dash line does thanks to a collaborator who saw to it that that thing was excavated I'm not sure what's going to happen to it next but we do have confirmation that in fact that at least the subterranean elements of that dam do in fact extend all the way there so let me give you some half baked conclusions despite the fact that we've had four seasons already I feel like this work is we're still just underway but I can say that so far we're finding largely what we expected to find we're finding a kind of a very full landscape in a way that we feel is non natural lots of small sites far away from water at the same time we're finding a transformation of the hydrological landscape in the form of irrigation systems water diversion and certainly the large capital cities it's complicated by the fact that there was a pre-existing very full landscape and we're in the process of trying to pull those apart to see to what extent really this was this was planning but I found myself kind of trying to get out of the mentality of this top down approach which you know satellite images don't help if you're trying to get out of a top down approach and I'm trying to think about I'm starting I wanted to know more about this guy finding all these small sites that are being trod upon by goats and I think the next step is to try to figure out what were these people's lives like and this is where landscape archaeology starts to fail us this is going to take excavation in and so I when I talk about this I always throw this out there in hopes that somebody will say yeah I'd like to do that because I shouldn't be allowed near a trial this is not what I do and archaeological sites should be protected from me I'm a survey person but this is really something that we can't do if we really want to understand what the lives of these people were like as they lived in possibly were forcibly deposited in this core part of the Syrian empire one thing we can say is they don't seem to have stayed there very long now these deportations they took place over generations but by the time we get our next good ceramic glimpse of what that landscape looks like it had been transformed a lot of those small sites were no longer occupied people had pulled up and gone somewhere else did they go back to Anatolia, Israel the Zagros well this we don't know I mean you could suppose that maybe some of these deportees retain some memory of where their parents or their grandparents or their ancestors came from and felt like with the collapse of political power they should go back to those places this I don't this this we can't say but we can say that by the time we have the good vivid picture in the Hellenistic period it's a really radically different landscape it has it other interesting characteristics but it doesn't seem to it it doesn't seem to be completely connected to what we saw at the at the height of of Assyria so this continues to be a place where you can work it is challenging it occasionally is makes your life interesting we lost two seasons thanks to ISIS when when the ISIS militants left Mosul in 2014 and came and began an attack on Erbil they got as far as a place called where there and a place called Mahmour there before they were before the Americans started to bring in airstrikes to give you a sense of where my contracts the Kurds have given me the permission to survey within this area that was really really close we took a couple of seasons off but that has long since retreated we now work firmly within the the security zone of the city of Erbil I don't even have to pull out my passport anymore as I go from the city out into this countryside to do survey a bigger issue that we're faced with as we try to move forward with this project is development Erbil being one of the safest and parts of the Middle East right now certainly of Syria and Iraq has gone from a little the tell with a town around it in 19 this is I think 1967 this is a Sentinel-2 image from last March you can see that what was right here this is to the same scale the ring roads keep going further and further out so we feel like we're in a race against time that's why these remote sensing techniques and drone based recording really we need this help to move more quickly and fortunately we're not doing it the days of the foreigners showing up for a few weeks and doing a bit of this and then retreating back to their universities are I think they're over in this area we have a particularly strong we've trained a particularly strong bunch of local archeologists do the flying and are beginning to do some of the mapping and collection work as well it may be a time when this is a year round survey project and and I come in just when the university will let me go so I am cautiously optimistic we have a fantastic multinational survey team with Americans and French and Dutch and Italians and Brits and we'll continue to do this work with our Iraqi Kurdish colleagues I'll end just by thanking the Kurdistan regional government especially its representation in Washington DC which is very interested to have American teams working in this region NSF, Nat Geo and Dumbart and Oaks have been wonderful funders that I very much appreciate and after what I understand has been a very long day for many of you of sitting in rooms listening to people talk thanks all to you for coming and listening to yet one more talk should I take does anybody ever say no no questions and drop the mic and walk straight out I will now entertain your questions is that formal enough you first and then please this has been some of the most exciting work especially in urban landscapes where new developments in LIDAR have allowed landscape archeologists like me working in tropical environments where you have to strip all that vegetation off and see what's underneath it and these Mesoamerican these lowland Mesoamerican cities have gone from plausibly being interpreted as vacant ritual centers to being revealed to be unbelievably dense very heavily populated urban places so I particularly like this because of my kind of bottom-up leanings to see that yes there were actual people there that actually did things like terrace their landscapes houses and stuff like that if you saw some ground photographs you'll realize that vegetation canopy is not an issue for me so I have not begun to explore vegetation but I'm very interested in this work yeah we are with surface material for dating criteria we're wholly dependent on surface artifacts and association of those artifacts with the site and unfortunately a lot of the forms the ceramic forms that we use are extremely durable and in fact we know that some of the types that we call Neo-Assyrian actually extended into what would politically be the Neo-Babylonian period a time after the collapse of the empire so no we can't tell and in fact it's possible that the ultimate dissolution of this Assyrian imperial landscape wasn't with the dissolution of political power in Assyria could have been later but that makes for much less interesting of a much more messy of a narrative so I wait for somebody to ask a question in the Q&A to admit to admit to that what I'd really like to know is whether we can see any evidence in the ceramic collections for the arrival of people who might still be adhering to ceramic manufacturing traditions from their homelands is there Anatolian pottery at this site Anatolian Iron Age pottery at this site or something like that where I'm hoping that at a later stage we can revisit these collections right now I'm doing the processing I don't know, I don't know Leventine pottery I wouldn't see this but I'm hoping that when we can have a proper steady season I can bring in Iron Age specialists from a much larger part of the empire who can address that question please I think Tony Wilkinson I think was your mentor under Assyria was a pre-Lyda but he was definitely using satellite imagery and was really interested in pathways between settlements going across the network of pathways which would sort of help with your idea of artificial versus natural So I'm sort of a technologically savvy version of Tony Wilkinson Tony I was relaying the story earlier today Tony was the one who discovered the declassification of these intelligence images and when he introduced them to me he had bought a photographic positive and he was shining a light on it up against the wall of his office and he taped a piece of paper to the wall and he was penciling out what he saw and he said to me and a bunch of his other students why don't you do something with GIS with this so he gets full credit for discovering this source and a lot of my dissertation research was tracing exactly these roadways which are overwhelmingly early bronze age and I'm really disappointed to say that the lovely patterns that I found in northeastern Syria with these trackways seem to have been obliterated in the core of the Assyrian empire I think by the Assyrian emphasis on irrigation I think that in the northeastern parts of Syria where these bronze age road networks are really clear on the satellite image they survived because the Assyrians never did this level of intensive irrigation that they did in the core so what we're seeing when I see no trackways whatsoever I think it's because they were probably there but they were just wiped clean in the Iron Age by a very top down water intensive form of land use so I looked you know and I have to bear in mind when I curse modern development for wiping clean some of my landscape features I have to realize and I have to kind of remind myself wiping clean of landscape features is not something that's unique to the 21st century I mean the Iron Age the Assyrians were wiping clean the bronze age landscape and the bronze age people removed any sign of early mobile people that might be interested to study so it's a long process question yeah the what software am I using I started off using the Agisoft Photoscan which is fantastic software and affordable I have to say it's a 500 dollar license and it was great but what I found was the Esri drone to map being intended for geographic scale work I mean you can use the Agisoft software to model a landscape but really you can use it on objects as well it does the stitching and the production of the ortho photo and the production of a model a lot yes it's built on the Pix4D engine if you've done anything with Pix4D so it has the same requirements it's the kind of thing that you run overnight if you have a nice computer if you don't have a nice computer you run it over a weekend but the output is fantastic I bought I bought for in the field I bought a gamer's computer this is a world that I don't live in because I needed to get a job and get tenure so I don't know the gamer world but I came to realize that these computers that are designed for playing for shooting each other in a virtual environment in these games fantastic for this kind of processing so I bought one of those and that allowed I did it on a laptop so the nice thing about the drone to map software is it's intuitively landscape oriented and also it has a great facility for batching so I could run three models and then go to bed and then the next morning three would have run sequentially so I'm a fan it's not cheap but it's useful thank you please have any of them have you ever been able to follow any of these water resources because they eventually lead to somewhere how successful have you been in finding newer areas that have never been discovered before by just following the path of water yeah the problem is one of survival it's a taffanomic issue we can find the big ones with the exception of that lovely set of small possibly orchard irrigating features for the most part we find the one that I showed you that video of the ones that are a hundred meters wide and eight meters deep that survive is fed distributaries and fields but that's been wiped clean that hasn't survived so here's where in a fantasy I have a team of geophysicists who come out and they find the stuff under the ground but they seem to have largely been the surface remains seem to have been wiped clean so this makes it a little bit uncomfortable because we're left with only the top down part we're left with the signature of what the state did it's entirely possible that the state just built this backbone and then local decision makers about water we're doing interesting stuff that might kind of make us think twice about a real top down landscape it would kind of move more towards the middle of that continuum and then local people took over you know that that's the kind of thing that I strongly suspect but the it's that it's that emergent end of the continuum that's least vigorous at least likely to survive and so we're left with the skeleton that looks really top down so I'm I worry about this build on that please lead to the lack of visibility of smaller canals would not your settlement pattern in the neos here where you kept you made a point about them being off the waterways they've got to be on some waterways so could they not be on man-made waterways so could they not be where these no longer in fact building on my geophysics fantasy here I have thought about since they some of them potentially if you squint they line up what about doing some transects some geophysical transects across there what what I do know is I have stared intensely at these areas trying to find some of these the dark lines that we interpret as the remains of of canals and I can't find them in this area but it may be a case where sort of some targeted geophysics could do this I'm not I'm not a geophysist I'm an admirer of geophysics and I don't know if this sort of thing is done but it seems like it would be really it would allow it would allow your hypothesis of a water system behind these these kind of high and dry sites to be tested and I would love to do that so I can see that you don't have a base patient canopy today but what about in the past there have been irrigation presumably I guess my question is what kind of human impact on the environment can you see with any data yeah so this is another sort of the data set that I have right now is really strongly oriented towards the settlements and the surface artifacts and it hasn't gotten into these kind of kind of environmental questions that we need to ask in order to answer that sort of question so I the question of what was the whether there were whether the vegetation was different we need some people to excavate some of these sites to look at charcoal remains to see if what kind of fuel was being used was there wood in the area I mean certainly there are very very few trees today but it's been 3000 years since the Assyrians but even before them the plane had long since been settled and even urbanized so the question of when that transition might have happened do we blame the Assyrians? Certainly the settlement patterns suggest that they could take some blame but it could have been much earlier my please towards excavate some of these small sites this is a real challenge in order to really understand this landscape we have to come down from low earth orbit and start putting holes in some of these sites to test this sort of thing but it's historically been really hard to get rural sites in this area excavated so you can get permission to dig a site like like Nineveh the Iraqis are really happy for you to do that they're not so happy about you kind of wasting your energy on excavating a small village site that no tourist is ever going to want to come to see so they would encourage you to dig these big sites which is frustrating for me because that would help me answer your question we don't have that data well so this is related to the question that Ruth asked and I can tell you I don't have a good image here there are a few that connect very closely to gates in the Assyrian capital cities I don't have any good ones attached to any of the provincial places like Erbil but I can show you lovely systems that radiate on gates that you've excavated on the southern end of Nineveh and especially at Nimrud but there's so few compared to the network of the Bronze Age, the early Bronze Age especially that we see in adjacent parts of northeastern Syria that have not been I think it's related to land use if you're intensively cultivating in a dry farming way they're more likely I think to be etched into the ground then under the Assyrian regime something that needs to be tested so what I really would like to have done is to see nice Assyrian processional ways that we know from texts going out of these out of these gateways into the countryside and that's something that will require a more peaceful Iraq to really test do I have time for one more and it's you, this better be good yeah so that's precisely that's I think that's precisely the question to ask with this new ability to produce accurate volumetric estimates we know there's probably the need for a good ethnoarcheological study done first to see the life span of mud brick architecture and you know develop a model for how a site will grow through time with certain assumptions about wall thickness and survival rates and then we could come up with a model for dividing up well I'm thinking out loud here so I'm going to say something dumb but we'd have to kind of have ideas about space between density of architecture within settlements and stuff like that but this would be great are you looking for a dissertation okay that would be great because it would really show especially some of these small ephemeral neo-syrian sites it might suggest whether it had been there for two centuries, three centuries of syrian life or if it were deportees that stayed there until they until the political power was no longer in place to keep them there and that would be if we see a lot of I showed you the small hector the horizontal area measurement if I could attach that to a small volume measurement as well I think that would be even more powerful argument for the ephemerality of this rural landscape but it's asked me in a few years okay that was a good question to end with so thank you