Archaeology Tour Ur: Deep Trench in Area NH
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- Опубликовано: 17 окт 2024
- In 2015 a joint Iraqi and SUNY Stony Brook team began a 10x10 meter trench in Area NH of the ancient city of Ur. The purpose was to compare information from that trench to that which Leonard Woolley found long ago. His Area NH contained the best preserved housing from the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods (around 600-400 BCE), the last periods of occupation at Ur. But we wanted to go beneath and look at other periods as well. So we opened the trench in a Neo-Babylonian courtyard and went down through more than 1500 years of history.
It was surprising just how far we had to go to reach the Ur III period, around 2100 BCE. It took three seasons to get close. Then the permit shifted to the Penn Museum and we knew we had to fill the trench back in as it was just too deep. First, we continued a small portion of the bottom of the trench to confirm we had reached the Ur III.
In this video I document the trench in a general way, talking about what we found and trying to clarify the current thinking about the different periods. I filmed this late in 2022 just before we filled it back in with soil and there is already fabric placed over some of the walls to show where we had stopped digging and to help protect them a little more, as they are not likely to ever be uncovered again.
It can be very difficult to sort and understand the different periods, since people were living atop the ruins of the previous people and they often dug pits down into those lower levels, partially destroying them. We are still working with the data gathered from the trench, including radiocarbon samples, and will publish the results in a final report when it is all analyzed.
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5000 years of more or less continuous habitation, that's incredible to think about. Hundreds of generations, living one above another.
This is extremely cool stuff tbh
This is the most up-close footage of Ur I have ever seen, much less inside of a residential structure, absolutely insane, thank you immensely for sharing!
I'm here for all the wholesome comments! What a joy to read.
as an architect this tour was absolutley amazingl, thank you Dr.
Thanks for sharing. On-site video with narration is a great way to teach.
Thank you so much for this tour! Do you have a sense of who would have been living/working in these buildings? I'm curious about the socio/economic demographics of the "neighborhood" and if they changed over time or if they remained fairly steady.
I'm also interested to know if there is any information you've been able to glean about the relationship of these more urban people with their environment. Did they have gardens or farm plots attached to their homes, or were they just bringing in all of their agricultural goods from the outside?
Actually, the more I think about this, the more questions I have...
We aren't certain who lived in the buildings in this particular trench. In the Old Babylonian trash pit we found a lot of school tablets, and it is rather common to find people learning cuneiform in their houses. In Woolley's Area AH just 20 meters north of here there are many houses with cuneiform tablets that identify the owners and several of them are merchants. Farther north and west we have the house of a general in Hammurabi's army and still farther north we have the homes of several priests or temple workers.
Agricultural fields were mostly outside the city, though there may have been a few small gardens or orchards within the city walls. Barley was a big product farmed in massive fields outside the city and huge numbers of sheep were raised outside the walls as well.
Hey Brad, thanks for these videos. Not sure how these don't show up in my feed. But I'm commenting to hopefully sway the algorithm in your favor.
Inhabited for 5,000 years... abandoned for 2,000... just mind-blowing.
I greatly appreciate your expertise and sharing it with us on Ur...But please, pivot your camera around more, so we can see it all and take it in.
Many thanks.
Thank you for sharing these amaz8ng sites, so very much.
I doubt I will ever see it in person.
Amazing video! Thank you! What I would give to be able to sit down with you and just ask questions about the mesopotamian civilizations!
Thanks!
Fantastic video "blog" / lecture. Thank you for taking us along!
Hello Dr. Brad! I have questions! Where these areas wooded (or at least vegetated) in the period the these structures where built? if so is it possible human intervention made ir more arid?
Hello!
The area changed quite a bit over 5000 years. In the earliest period it was heavily marshy around Ur and the Gulf was much farther north than it is now. It was never wooded, though, beyond a few poplars, tamarisk brush, and of course date palms. The marshes slowly dried and human intervention probably did have an impact on environment. People were manipulating water courses heavily in order to bring water to expanding fields, and the river carried a lot of silt, which pushed the head of the Gulf slowly south.
Strong wood was sometimes brought in from the mountainsides far away and so there was some deforestation there. But this was expensive and time-consuming. That and the lack of stone is why they built with brick. Clay was common.
@@artifactuallyspeaking i recall many years ago writing on this period and area and finding the conclusions that salinisation and dereasing crop yields were a feature of their cultivation system and whilst they were aware of this trend, they were unable to diminish the cumulative degredation of the environment that contributed decline of the culture ( coupled with the deposition and moving of the delta many km south ) and ultimately is the end point of most human interaction via agriculture around the globe and throughout time ?
I wish there was more than a single thumb's up to give this video. If there were a 1-10 system I'd "dial it up to 11."
This is so cool. Thank you for sharing an inside view. SO cool.
Great video thank you for putting this out for all us to see places and history that we my not be able to see otherwise
Thanks for this interesting inside.
So damn cool. I love seeing the actual archeological sites!
what an amazing site
It's fantastic seeing this in situ and the complexity of all these layers on top of each other. As soon as you said you were digging in the courtyard I wondered if there were any dead. It's incredible to think of all these generations of people living in the same area, the same space.
Just amazing! Thank you
Old brick walls look way better than the more recent ones !!
What a fantastic insight! Thank you so much. 🤗
what a priviledge to work and explore such a storied scene, but also so many voices it's hard to discern even a word ! Amazing, please keep making these, your pragmatic disposition reminds me of Mick Aston of Time Team, allowing the facts to speak and not being afraid of the unknown is the real treasure.
Fascinating stuff! It's amazing how you can see thousands of years of history in one trench. I have all sorts of questions.
1. Is the rate of deposition particularly high there? You're really deep down, and stuff that's only separated by a couple of centuries still seems to be a foot or two apart. With the walls at all sorts of angles, it implies (to me, anyway) that the old walls were totally hidden under dirt before the next layer was built over it.
2. Are the bricks standardised using moulds, or are they fully made by hand? Does this change over the many periods you see?
3. Are the bricks all made of local clay? Is there a particular source where it was dug up?
4. Do you translate every bit of writing you uncover?
5. Are you able to determine the functions of any of the buildings you've excavated?
Do you have any recommendations for a hood book about this area's history?
1) Deposits in this area of the site are quite high; trash fill and successive habitation were common here. Another reason for high preservation of walls, though, is that even while living in a building people would resurface their floors from time to time, sometimes filling in as much as half a meter. This likely coincided with roof repairs or replacement, adding courses to the height of the overall building as well. New builders would often push the old remains down and build atop, leaving a large area of old material beneath.
2) The earliest bricks we have were made by hand but they shifted to moulds pretty quickly. Mould-made bricks were typically standardized and they sometimes changed dimensions in different periods. Woolley put a lot of stock in identifying time period by size of brick, but we have to be careful with that. The typical Old Babylonian brick is about 24x16x8cm.
3) Clay is very common in Mesopotamia and yes, they are all locally made.
4) We have an on-site specialist in ancient languages who translates everything. Sometimes we find so much that he has to keep working on photos and notes after the season and Woolley found so many that not all of those (particularly fragments of tablets) have been translated.
5) We do know the functions of most buildings. Function of individual rooms is more difficult to determine.
It's hard to find an overall history of the Ancient Near East that's really good because the history and geography are immense. There are several that cover portions of it well, though. Postgate's Early Mesopotamia, Roaf's Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia, Kuhrt's Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium, Van de Mieroop's Ancient Mesopotamian City... the list goes on, these are just the general ones that spring to mind.
@@artifactuallyspeaking thank you very much for the answers!
Very cool to see some of the nitty gritty of how digs like this are done and what you can learn from them. Feels like it gives a more complete picture of what we know and how we know it compared than just seeing a summary or artists rendition of it. Thanks for the tour!
For me it's still a mystery how this happens.
You know, how people could lost Nero's Palace :)
I do understand physics, but... Layers upon layers of houses.
Fascinating.
Interesting 🤔
Absolutely amazing. What would you say would provide sufficient evidence that the sacking of Ur happened? Similar ash deposits, arrowheads etc. found at other sites?
I'd like to see similar destruction layers in many places around the site to confirm. But there isn't much Ur III exposed beyond the sacred area. The Ur III mausoleum was apparently destroyed and Woolley attributed the destruction to the Elamites. There is a good deal of ancient literature, partially mythologized, of the destruction of Ur around 2000 BCE, and political supremacy definitely moved to another city, so it seems likely that something catastrophic happened here.
Super interesting!
Thank you for the fascinating glimpse into the complexity of the site!
One thing that struck me was the brickwork. It appears to be very well constructed and levelled.
The builders would presumably had something equivalent to a spirit level, and I'm wondering how the levelling was achieved.
Plumbobs
@@seanbeadles7421
I can see how that might work!
Thanks Sean
They definitely had vertical plummets (plumb bobs) and I'll be talking about one of those in a short video later. This would help them make sure their walls went straight up. But as you note, they also did a good job of leveling horizontally. We don't have indications of an ancient spirit level, but water in a bowl will make a level surface and they may have used that somehow as a comparison when building at least the foundation course.
@@artifactuallyspeaking
I couldn't find my spirit level a few months back, so used a glass jug, so I did wonder if a bowl of water was used.
FWIW Having got my fish tank level, I found a spirit level and am now going to relocate the fish tank anyway!
Bloody Murphy and his blooming law! lol
Looking forward to your future video on the plumb bobs!
Thank you very much professor, astounding work! That trench is impressive indeed. You dont get much rain down there do you? Joking aside, great job !
Thank you for posting this, I wanted to be an archeologist as a kid and getting to see you do the work is super cool.
These videos are great for me as an anthropology student. Thank you.
Seriously just amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. I would love to have the opportunity to be able to experience that journey of the people who were critical in who we are today
On the Reed mats, it adds great structural support, have you seen the examples in sand, where plain sand supports little weight, but with interlayers of paper or whichever, it can support a car
Wow, this is deep;
Cool video 👍
Enthralling, brilliant work !👍
What is the process of choosing where to dig, and how do you continue to dig the lower layers without destroying the upper ones,?
Choosing where to dig is dictated by research goals and conditions of the site. If your goal is to get to deeper time periods, you try to find an area that has already been eroded down or an area where you have open space in the later levels (and this is most often determined by remote sensing and walking survey).
Archaeology is by its nature destructive and that's why it's so important that we document everything very carefully. If we encounter major architecture in a level, we don't remove it, but minor traces we might remove (after much consultation) in order to discover what is beneath. In this case, we chose to dig through a large courtyard at the surface, so that we could get below without disturbing the upper walls. Then we encountered trash pits that had already disturbed many of the lower levels. Finally, we reached mud walls and were allowed to remove a few, leaving most intact.
i love these videos
Fascinating
Thank you.
Beautiful video, thank you
This is awesome. Thanks for sharing
Hello Dr Brad, my one question is why would you fill the hole back in? Spend years unearthing it to turn around and cover it back up. Is it just to keep people from messing with the site? Because there are natural trenches and holes all over the Earth
Good question and the answer is basically that it was just too deep to leave open. Iraq wants to increase tourism at Ur and there was a risk of someone accidentally falling in.
Plus, it was too deep to continue working in, with the risk of collapse harming workers, and we had recorded all the work we did; so, the data was collected and the mission in that trench was over. Backfill is often part of archaeology for these reasons and because soil cover protects areas that remain unexcavated.
Great stuff! Thanks.
Brilliant video, thanks!
Imagine building there year on year, so slowly that you don't realise the ground disappearing beneath you until eventually, you have no idea what was beneath your feet
im so curious, with the packed mud wall, when you start a dig how do you know the difference between the material you are removing and the wall itself? (sorry if this seems like a dumb question)
Not a dumb question at all. It's one of the hardest things about mud brick in archaeology and even harder with tauf or pise walls, where it's just packed mud and not even bricks. In this case there is only a slight difference between wall and surroundings, a bit more if they plastered the wall (thin layer of clean mud spread on the vertical surfaces, which we did find at some doorways).
But the real key in this case that allowed us to find and follow the walls was the reed mats they laid down horizontally every 30 cm or so while they were packing the mud. This left an impression and a kind of dust that still bore the pattern of the weave of the reed mat. We reached these as we dug down and found that some were parallel, others at right angles to each other. We followed the lines and found the vertical walls.
@@artifactuallyspeaking appreciate you taking the time to satisfy my curiosity, this stuff is so fascinating. wish i made some different life choices xD
@ 11.50 you mention the reed mat of the foundation . Has this been dated? By carbon dating or otherwise?
Very interesting work you are doing
The reed mat has completely disintegrated into powder (but the powder has retained the pattern of the woven reeds). It wouldn't return a 14C date, but we do have burned material that I plan to use for carbon 14. The technique is not often used in southern Mesopotamia but I think it should be used more. I'm currently waiting for our samples to be allowed to leave Iraq so we can send them to a lab.
@@artifactuallyspeaking
Thank you
Does the larnax still contain the bones?
Yes, almost certainly. The larnax is intact and so the bones will be beneath it. We didn't have time to excavate the burial with the amount of detail and care that it needed, so we left it alone and dug north of it. We have excavated a few other burials from that layer in previous seasons, which will give us the scientific data we need. In this season we needed to find out what was below that layer, so we dug away from the grave and then covered everything with soil when we left.
@@artifactuallyspeakingThat's so cool, thanks for the detailed answer.
How come they keep building on top of old foundations like that?
The main reason is that It was easier to flatten out a fallen mud brick structure than to remove all of the mud brick and build on the old surface. They also did rebuilding in stages; they refloored at times by bringing in dirt and packing it down, raising the level and this might also mean they had to make a new roof. Roofs wore out more quickly than walls.
Baked brick might be reused, but dried mud brick would break up and was much harder to reuse, so if they couldn't extend the wall upwards and put a new roof on, they would knock the whole thing down and put new brick on top of the new surface.
12:23 was that a scorpion coming towards you?
No, it's just a beetle and they're quite common. Scorpions are not as common, but we do run into them as well as camel spiders.
@@artifactuallyspeakingOh wow I'm from Iraq but I have never seen a camel spider before.
Where can I get the same hat as you?
I don't remember where I got that one, but my latest came from Forestry Suppliers.
I love the commentary, but would prefer that you occasionally would just frame the objects in the screen, instead of trying to keep yourself on screen full time. For me, your voice and comments are fine as they are, but instead of seeing you grope with one hand off camera, we lose many valuable seconds in which we could be seeing the objects while _listening_ to your knowledge. That would be the best possible use of time. You don't need rigid adherence to a trendy presentation format. The _factual_ content includes dwelling on the objects, because we are never going to see them live, so please maximize their few fleeting seconds of fame.
With much respect.
All part of the distraction show. Look over here, not at what's happening behind the scenes.
We're watching, though.
I hope to see more exciting videos like this one in the near future. You should look into using 'promosm'!