Remote Sensing of Ancient Mesopotamian Settlement Systems

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

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.