Books by Andrea Squitieri
Exploring Assur 1, 2024
Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/115818/
This first volume of... more Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/115818/
This first volume of the new series „Exploring Assur“ presents the results of the fieldwork conducted at Assur, modern Qal’at Sherqat, in 2023, with a focus on the New Town in the south of the settlement, and contains contributions by Mark Altaweel, Silvia Amicone, Katleen Deckers, Jörg Fassbinder, Holger Gzella, Sandra Hahn, Jean-Jacques Herr, Veronica Hinterhuber, F. Janoscha Kreppner, İnci Nurgül Özdoğru, Karen Radner, Jana Richter, Jens Rohde, Lena Ruider, Claudia Sarkady, Michaela Schauer, Annette Paetz gen. Schieck, Andrea Squitieri, Andreas Stele, and Marco Wolf.
At Assur, the team is based in the excavation house first used by Walter Andrae from 1903-1914, and as this building is a protected monument within the UNESCO World Heritage site of Assur, a chapter is dedicated to its history. The early years come to life through the letters of Andrae and many photographs that he and his staff took of the building, reproduced courtesy of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin.
The fieldwork undertaken in 2023 included a program of magnetometer and electrical resistivity tomography prospecting and sediment coring in the New Town of Assur, whose results are presented together with a study of soil and sediment magnetism based on coring samples. The magnetogram of the New Town substantially deepens our knowledge of the settlement’s organisation in the first centuries AD when the city was part of the Parthian world. The excavations conducted in the southern part of the New Town, directly adjoining an area excavated by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in 2002, brought to light a sizeable chamber tomb of 46 m2 from that period, with over a dozen skeletons.
Moreover, the excavations yielded highly welcome new evidence for the Hellenistic occupation of Assur, namely Building A and two burials (Graves 3 and 4). The dead were placed underneath clay sarcophagi of an ovoid-elliptical shape. One bears an incised alphabetic inscription dated to the month Ab in the year 153 of the Seleucid era, that is July/August 158 BC. Brief as the text is, it provides precious insights into writing and dating practices at Assur after the end of local cuneiform writing and before the rise of the Eastern Mesopotamian scribal tradition that would eventually spread to Hatra and other areas. This burial also contained calcinated textile fragments of at least six different types of cloth.
New data for the Assyrian occupation of Assur originates from some small-scale work undertaken on the edge of the Iraqi trench of 2002, from the partially excavated Building B and from Grave 5, which contained typical 7th century BC items including a bronze fibula and a glazed miniature vessel. A deep sounding dug down from this burial to the virgin soil yielded pottery types that are well known from sites in the Assyrian heartland and the Syrian Jazirah in the 13th century BC, including fragments of carinated bowls and beakers with elongated bodies and nipple bases, as well as a piece of charcoal with a radiocarbon dating range of 1506-1440 calBC (95.4% probability). This date corresponds well with the oldest mention of the construction of the wall and the gates of the New Town in the inscriptions of Puzur-Aššur III, whose reign is conventionally dated to 1521-1498 BC. In total, the 2023 excavations produced 17 radiocarbon dating ranges, derived from the analysis of charcoal, seeds and human teeth; these are the very first 14C dates available from Assur.
Another first for Assur is the palaeobotanical analysis of 133 charred wood fragments and 8,655 carbonised plant remains, which provides an entirely new dataset for reconstruction of the ancient environment. Chapters on the pottery, with first steps towards a fabric classification for Assur by means of portable X-ray fluorescence and petrographic analyses, the small finds and the epigraphic finds (cuneiform and alphabetic) round off the volume.
Peshdar Plain Project Publications 5, 2020
Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74269/ Order the print volume: ... more Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/74269/ Order the print volume: https://www.pewe-verlag.de/?page_id=2301
The fifth volume of the annual Peshdar Plain Project’s reports presents a comprehensive account of the 2019 fieldwork activities at the Dinka Settlement Complex, which included excavations, environmental studies and the continuation of the geophysical survey by Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT).
On the one hand, our 2019 fieldwork focused on further improving our understanding of the large-scale urbanised settlement in the upper valley of the Lower Zab river that its good state of preservation and excellent archaeological accessibility make a key site for the study of the Iron Age in the Zagros mountain range of northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Our excavations on Qalat-i Dinka, the settlement’s Upper Town, completed the unearthing of the monumental Building P and also brought to light substantial evidence for cremation and inhumation burials around this building; burial inventories include such diagnostic materials as fibulae, cylinder seals and a bronze drinking vessel. The volume presents a discussion by Jean-Jacques Herr and Silvia Amicone of the pottery and an overview by Andrea Squitieri of the small finds retrieved during the 2019 excavation. The latter is complemented by Friedhelm Pedde’s study of the five bronze fibulae and Anja Fügert’s study of the three cylinder seals in the “Assyrian provincial style”. Also on Qalat-i Dinka, the partially excavated fortifications first identified by magnetometer prospecting in 2015 were further investigated using ERT surveying under the direction of Jörg Fassbinder, which confirmed the previous interpretation of the structures as a combination of a glacis and a palisade wall. Down in the Lower Town and the surrounding Bora Plain, ERT prospecting and sediment coring were used to gain new data on the qanat system and the ancient environment of the Dinka Settlement Complex, greatly aided by Eileen Eckmeier’s ongoing analysis of soil samples as well as faunal and plant remains (macro-botanical and phytoliths), on all of which reports are presented in the present volume.
On the other hand, also much earlier periods of the occupation of the Bora Plain have come into sharper focus in 2019, chiefly through the excavation of a Chalcolithic pottery kiln under the Iron Age structures of the Lower Town excavation area DLT3.
Moreover, the volume presents the results of analyses of materials previously excavated at the Dinka Settlement Complex. Anja Hellmuth Kramberger discusses all Iron arrowheads found between 2015-2019, mainly on Qalat-i Dinka. The bodkin-type specimen found in 2015 at Gird-i Bazar is the subject of a micro-CT study by Thilo Rehren, Raouf Jemmali, Silvia Amicone and Cristoph Berthold. Anja Prust presents the identification and analyses of the animal remains recovered from 2015-2019 as well as a discussion of all artefacts made of faunal remains. Fatemeh Ghaheri offers first results on her ongoing study of the phytolith samples taken during the excavations from 2015-2019 while Melissa S. Rosenzweig and Anne Grasse present preliminary outcomes of their analyses of the macrobotanical remains collected from 2015-2018.
Peshdar Plain Project Publications 4, 2019
Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/68561/ Order the print volume: ... more Download the Open Access version: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/68561/ Order the print volume: http://en.pewe-verlag.de/index.php?page=near-eastern-archaeology
The good state of preservation and the excellent archaeological accessibility directly below the modern surface make the 60 hectare large Dinka Settlement Complex (DSC, including Gird-i Bazar and Qalat-i Dinka) in the Bora Plain a key site for the investigation of the Iron Age in the Zagros mountains of northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran. In 2018, the Peshdar Plain Project's excavations and its continuing geophysical survey and palaeo-environmental investigations have further improved our understanding of the extended Iron Age settlement, and also brought to light new information on other periods of the Bora Plain’s long history, both much older (Late Chalcolithic 1-2) and much younger (Middle Islamic Period) than the Iron Age occupation on which our research continues to focus. The present work offers a comprehensive report of the 2018 fieldwork activities, which included excavations, a programme of environmental studies (geology, geomorphology, soil analysis) and the continuation of the geophysical survey.
Excavations took place in three parts of the settlement: in the Upper Town on the western slope of Qalat-i Dinka, in a new area of the Lower Town ("Dinka Lower Town operation 3" = DLT3), and in Gird-i Bazar where anthropologist Kathleen Downey exposed and interpreted more of the accumulation of human skeletons in the well of Room 49 in Building I (Grave 71).
The excavations on Qalat-i Dinka revealed on the one hand the monumental Building P, occupied by elite inhabitants as suggested by the high quality and value of the finds encountered there (including ivory fittings, beads of carnelian and Egyptian Blue and other jewellery as well as nine identical iron arrowheads), and on the other hand an elaborate fortification that once consisted of a high wooden palisade (of which the base survives) and a glacis that protected its more sensitive stretches. Radiocarbon dates and the pottery finds make it clear that this part of the settlement was occupied during the same broad Iron Age horizon as the areas excavated in the Lower Town of the settlement.
DLT3 was chosen for excavation because radiocarbon analysis of a charcoal sample recovered in 2015 from the section of the geoarchaeological trench GA42 had produced a probable date range of 830-789 calBC (95.4 % probability). Our work there aimed at investigating continuities and discontinuities that might have resulted from the annexation of the Bora Plain and the DSC into the Assyrian Empire and the establishment of the Border March of the Palace Herald in the second half of the 9th century BC. In addition to evidence for two distinct building phases during DSC’s Iron Age main occupation period, this area yielded good contexts dating to the Late Chalcolithic period, including a pottery kiln.
The volume presents the pottery and the small finds from the 2018 excavation areas. Among the Iron Age materials from Qalat-i Dinka, Egyptian faience covered in the synthetic pigment Naples Yellow was identified by archaeometric analysis while a broken brick from DLT3 can be assigned to the Neo-Assyrian period because of a title preserved in its fragmentary cuneiform inscription, most likely to Shalmaneser III (r. 859-824 BC), the founder of the Border March of the Palace Herald. The volume also includes analyses of some materials previously excavated at Gird-i Bazar. Tina Greenfield presents results of the identification and quantitative analyses of the animal bones recovered in 2015 and 2016 while Patrick Arneitz and Roman Leonhardt offer an archaeomagnetic study of the pottery kiln first identified in 2015.
Stone Tools in the Ancient Near East and Egypt: Ground stone tools, rock-cut installations and st... more Stone Tools in the Ancient Near East and Egypt: Ground stone tools, rock-cut installations and stone vessels from Prehistory to Late Antiquity is about groundstone tools, stone vessels, and devices carved into rock throughout the Near East and Egypt from Prehistory to the late periods. These categories of objects have too often been overlooked by archaeologists, despite their frequent occurrence in the archaeological record. Most importantly, a careful study of these tools reveals crucial insights into ancient societies. From the procuring of raw materials to patterns of use and discard, they provide us with a wealth of information about the activities they were involved in and how these activities were organised. These tools reveal patterns in the trade of both raw materials and finished products, inform us about economic aspects of food production and consumption, cast light on industrial activities, help establish intercultural connections, and offer hints about the relationship between sites and their environment. The aim of this book is to explore all aspects of these ubiquitous tools and to stimulate debate about the new methodologies needed to approach this material.
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Books by Andrea Squitieri
This first volume of the new series „Exploring Assur“ presents the results of the fieldwork conducted at Assur, modern Qal’at Sherqat, in 2023, with a focus on the New Town in the south of the settlement, and contains contributions by Mark Altaweel, Silvia Amicone, Katleen Deckers, Jörg Fassbinder, Holger Gzella, Sandra Hahn, Jean-Jacques Herr, Veronica Hinterhuber, F. Janoscha Kreppner, İnci Nurgül Özdoğru, Karen Radner, Jana Richter, Jens Rohde, Lena Ruider, Claudia Sarkady, Michaela Schauer, Annette Paetz gen. Schieck, Andrea Squitieri, Andreas Stele, and Marco Wolf.
At Assur, the team is based in the excavation house first used by Walter Andrae from 1903-1914, and as this building is a protected monument within the UNESCO World Heritage site of Assur, a chapter is dedicated to its history. The early years come to life through the letters of Andrae and many photographs that he and his staff took of the building, reproduced courtesy of the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft zu Berlin.
The fieldwork undertaken in 2023 included a program of magnetometer and electrical resistivity tomography prospecting and sediment coring in the New Town of Assur, whose results are presented together with a study of soil and sediment magnetism based on coring samples. The magnetogram of the New Town substantially deepens our knowledge of the settlement’s organisation in the first centuries AD when the city was part of the Parthian world. The excavations conducted in the southern part of the New Town, directly adjoining an area excavated by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in 2002, brought to light a sizeable chamber tomb of 46 m2 from that period, with over a dozen skeletons.
Moreover, the excavations yielded highly welcome new evidence for the Hellenistic occupation of Assur, namely Building A and two burials (Graves 3 and 4). The dead were placed underneath clay sarcophagi of an ovoid-elliptical shape. One bears an incised alphabetic inscription dated to the month Ab in the year 153 of the Seleucid era, that is July/August 158 BC. Brief as the text is, it provides precious insights into writing and dating practices at Assur after the end of local cuneiform writing and before the rise of the Eastern Mesopotamian scribal tradition that would eventually spread to Hatra and other areas. This burial also contained calcinated textile fragments of at least six different types of cloth.
New data for the Assyrian occupation of Assur originates from some small-scale work undertaken on the edge of the Iraqi trench of 2002, from the partially excavated Building B and from Grave 5, which contained typical 7th century BC items including a bronze fibula and a glazed miniature vessel. A deep sounding dug down from this burial to the virgin soil yielded pottery types that are well known from sites in the Assyrian heartland and the Syrian Jazirah in the 13th century BC, including fragments of carinated bowls and beakers with elongated bodies and nipple bases, as well as a piece of charcoal with a radiocarbon dating range of 1506-1440 calBC (95.4% probability). This date corresponds well with the oldest mention of the construction of the wall and the gates of the New Town in the inscriptions of Puzur-Aššur III, whose reign is conventionally dated to 1521-1498 BC. In total, the 2023 excavations produced 17 radiocarbon dating ranges, derived from the analysis of charcoal, seeds and human teeth; these are the very first 14C dates available from Assur.
Another first for Assur is the palaeobotanical analysis of 133 charred wood fragments and 8,655 carbonised plant remains, which provides an entirely new dataset for reconstruction of the ancient environment. Chapters on the pottery, with first steps towards a fabric classification for Assur by means of portable X-ray fluorescence and petrographic analyses, the small finds and the epigraphic finds (cuneiform and alphabetic) round off the volume.
The fifth volume of the annual Peshdar Plain Project’s reports presents a comprehensive account of the 2019 fieldwork activities at the Dinka Settlement Complex, which included excavations, environmental studies and the continuation of the geophysical survey by Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT).
On the one hand, our 2019 fieldwork focused on further improving our understanding of the large-scale urbanised settlement in the upper valley of the Lower Zab river that its good state of preservation and excellent archaeological accessibility make a key site for the study of the Iron Age in the Zagros mountain range of northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran. Our excavations on Qalat-i Dinka, the settlement’s Upper Town, completed the unearthing of the monumental Building P and also brought to light substantial evidence for cremation and inhumation burials around this building; burial inventories include such diagnostic materials as fibulae, cylinder seals and a bronze drinking vessel. The volume presents a discussion by Jean-Jacques Herr and Silvia Amicone of the pottery and an overview by Andrea Squitieri of the small finds retrieved during the 2019 excavation. The latter is complemented by Friedhelm Pedde’s study of the five bronze fibulae and Anja Fügert’s study of the three cylinder seals in the “Assyrian provincial style”. Also on Qalat-i Dinka, the partially excavated fortifications first identified by magnetometer prospecting in 2015 were further investigated using ERT surveying under the direction of Jörg Fassbinder, which confirmed the previous interpretation of the structures as a combination of a glacis and a palisade wall. Down in the Lower Town and the surrounding Bora Plain, ERT prospecting and sediment coring were used to gain new data on the qanat system and the ancient environment of the Dinka Settlement Complex, greatly aided by Eileen Eckmeier’s ongoing analysis of soil samples as well as faunal and plant remains (macro-botanical and phytoliths), on all of which reports are presented in the present volume.
On the other hand, also much earlier periods of the occupation of the Bora Plain have come into sharper focus in 2019, chiefly through the excavation of a Chalcolithic pottery kiln under the Iron Age structures of the Lower Town excavation area DLT3.
Moreover, the volume presents the results of analyses of materials previously excavated at the Dinka Settlement Complex. Anja Hellmuth Kramberger discusses all Iron arrowheads found between 2015-2019, mainly on Qalat-i Dinka. The bodkin-type specimen found in 2015 at Gird-i Bazar is the subject of a micro-CT study by Thilo Rehren, Raouf Jemmali, Silvia Amicone and Cristoph Berthold. Anja Prust presents the identification and analyses of the animal remains recovered from 2015-2019 as well as a discussion of all artefacts made of faunal remains. Fatemeh Ghaheri offers first results on her ongoing study of the phytolith samples taken during the excavations from 2015-2019 while Melissa S. Rosenzweig and Anne Grasse present preliminary outcomes of their analyses of the macrobotanical remains collected from 2015-2018.
The good state of preservation and the excellent archaeological accessibility directly below the modern surface make the 60 hectare large Dinka Settlement Complex (DSC, including Gird-i Bazar and Qalat-i Dinka) in the Bora Plain a key site for the investigation of the Iron Age in the Zagros mountains of northeastern Iraq and northwestern Iran. In 2018, the Peshdar Plain Project's excavations and its continuing geophysical survey and palaeo-environmental investigations have further improved our understanding of the extended Iron Age settlement, and also brought to light new information on other periods of the Bora Plain’s long history, both much older (Late Chalcolithic 1-2) and much younger (Middle Islamic Period) than the Iron Age occupation on which our research continues to focus. The present work offers a comprehensive report of the 2018 fieldwork activities, which included excavations, a programme of environmental studies (geology, geomorphology, soil analysis) and the continuation of the geophysical survey.
Excavations took place in three parts of the settlement: in the Upper Town on the western slope of Qalat-i Dinka, in a new area of the Lower Town ("Dinka Lower Town operation 3" = DLT3), and in Gird-i Bazar where anthropologist Kathleen Downey exposed and interpreted more of the accumulation of human skeletons in the well of Room 49 in Building I (Grave 71).
The excavations on Qalat-i Dinka revealed on the one hand the monumental Building P, occupied by elite inhabitants as suggested by the high quality and value of the finds encountered there (including ivory fittings, beads of carnelian and Egyptian Blue and other jewellery as well as nine identical iron arrowheads), and on the other hand an elaborate fortification that once consisted of a high wooden palisade (of which the base survives) and a glacis that protected its more sensitive stretches. Radiocarbon dates and the pottery finds make it clear that this part of the settlement was occupied during the same broad Iron Age horizon as the areas excavated in the Lower Town of the settlement.
DLT3 was chosen for excavation because radiocarbon analysis of a charcoal sample recovered in 2015 from the section of the geoarchaeological trench GA42 had produced a probable date range of 830-789 calBC (95.4 % probability). Our work there aimed at investigating continuities and discontinuities that might have resulted from the annexation of the Bora Plain and the DSC into the Assyrian Empire and the establishment of the Border March of the Palace Herald in the second half of the 9th century BC. In addition to evidence for two distinct building phases during DSC’s Iron Age main occupation period, this area yielded good contexts dating to the Late Chalcolithic period, including a pottery kiln.
The volume presents the pottery and the small finds from the 2018 excavation areas. Among the Iron Age materials from Qalat-i Dinka, Egyptian faience covered in the synthetic pigment Naples Yellow was identified by archaeometric analysis while a broken brick from DLT3 can be assigned to the Neo-Assyrian period because of a title preserved in its fragmentary cuneiform inscription, most likely to Shalmaneser III (r. 859-824 BC), the founder of the Border March of the Palace Herald. The volume also includes analyses of some materials previously excavated at Gird-i Bazar. Tina Greenfield presents results of the identification and quantitative analyses of the animal bones recovered in 2015 and 2016 while Patrick Arneitz and Roman Leonhardt offer an archaeomagnetic study of the pottery kiln first identified in 2015.