Place, Encounter, and the Making of Communities

This book sketches the first archaeological history of the lower Sirwan/upper Diyala river valley of north-east Iraq and adjacent landscapes over a period of c. 12,000 years, from the earliest signs of human presence until the mid-first millennium BCE, based on data gathered between 2013 and 2023 by the Sirwan Regional Project (SRP).

The central research objective of the SRP is to move beyond traditional historical topoi and their predominantly external and state-centric perspectives that have dominated narratives of the region thus far. Instead, we develop an in-depth, archaeological understanding of the nature of the region’s past communities, their cultural and economic practices, the modes of socio-political organisation they developed, adopted, and rejected, and their long-term developments.

In order to reconstruct past Sirwan lifeways, the book interweaves regional-scale datasets with the results of ongoing and completed excavations at the Late Chalcolithic site of Shakhi Kora and the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age site of Kani Masi, as well as the results of a wide range of archaeological, Assyriological, art historical, and archaeometric analyses.

Full list of contributing authors:
Claudia Glatz, Daniel Calderbank, Francesca Chelazzi, Salah Mohammed Sameen, Neil Erskine, Francesco Del Bravo, Nawzad Abdullatif, Mette Marie Hald, Adam E. Miglio, Elsa Perruchini, Mohammed Ali, Sarwat Hamdan, Aphrodite Sorotou, Eric Jensen, Aris Palyvos, Synnøve Gravdal Heimvik, Robin Bendrey, Jessica Pearson, Jacob Lauinger, Daniele Moscone, Andrea Squitieri, Emma Baysal, and Katheryn Twiss.