Kurd Qaburstan, A "Second Generation" Urban Site on the Erbil Plain

Summary

While the emergence and early trajectory of urbanism has been extensively studied in southern Mesopotamia and in Syria, similar research has been conspicuously rare in northern Iraq. Fieldwork at Kurd Qaburstan (ancient Qabra?) on the Erbil plain conducted by the Johns Hopkins University now affords an opportunity to investigate a major Bronze Age urban center of northern Iraq. Since its main period of occupation is the Middle Bronze Age (Old Babylonian period, early second millennium BC), work at Kurd Qaburstan is designed to study the nature of an urban community in an era of “second generation” urbanism, following the first urban florescence in the Early Bronze Age (third millennium BC). Paradigms of Middle Bronze Age “hollow cities” replicating third millennium urban design but lacking dense populations are tested, as are hypotheses of heterarchy. The results of two field seasons (2013 and 2014) include excavated exposures documenting Middle and Late Bronze occupation and geophysical prospection exposing 30 hectares of the Middle Bronze city and revealing some of its organizational characteristics.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• A New Archaeological Frontier: Urban Settlements and Landscapes in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq

Keywords

Spatial Coverage