Archaeological News: Ancient Iraq revealed: Harvard illuminates 'richest archaeological landscape in the Middle East':
After nearly a century away, Harvard archaeology has returned to Iraq.
Jason Ur, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, earlier this year launched a five-year archaeological project—the first such Harvard-led endeavor in the war-torn nation since the early 1930s—
square-kilometer area around Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq, for signs of ancient cities and towns, canals, and roads.
Already, Ur said, the effort is paying massive dividends—with some 1,200 potential sites identified in just a few months, and potentially thousands more in the coming years.
“What we’re finding is that this is, hands down, the richest archaeological landscape in the Middle East,” Ur said.