Ancient City of Alexander the Great found in KURDISTAN

[Anthea]

Drones Reveal Unexplored Ancient Settlement in South Kurdistan

The settlement was first spotted in declassified Cold War spy images from the 1960s

During the Cold War era, the United States’ Corona spy satellites snapped stealthy images of the Soviet Union, China and their allies in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. When these images were declassified in the 1990s, photos of a rocky terrace in Iraqi Kurdistan caught the attention of archaeologists, who believed they could spot the ancient remnants of a large, square fort. More recently, as Jack Malvern reports for the Times, researchers used drone technology to confirm that the site is indeed home to a previously unexplored fortified settlement.

Qalatga Darband, as the settlement is called, is located at a strategic point on the Darband-i-Rania pass, which once linked Mesopotamia to Iran, according to Lauren Sigfusson of Discovery. During the reign of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, the region was inaccessible to archaeologists. But recent improvements in security have allowed experts from the British Museum to explore the site as part of the institution’s Iraq Emergency Heritage Management and Training Scheme, which trains Iraqi participants to document and rescue archaeological sites threatened by the Islamic State.

The team’s survey began with topographic mapping and examinations of surface pottery, according to the website of the British Museum. To get an aerial view of the landscape, researchers turned to camera-equipped drones, which are increasingly being deployed during excavations because the technology is relatively cheap to operate and quickly captures detailed images of archaeological sites.

When drone images of Qalatga Darband were processed to enhance color differences, experts were able to observe subtle irregularities in crop growth—a key indicator that an ancient structure lay hidden beneath the ground.

“Where there are walls underground the wheat and barley don’t grow so well,” John MacGinnis, a lead archaeologist of the excavation project, tells Malvern. “[S]o there are color differences in the crop growth.”

The drone images helped archaeologists conclude that their suspicions about the Corona images were correct: a large, fortified structure sits in the northern part of Qalatga Darband. The team uncovered several other buildings, including what appears to be a monumental temple. The remnants of wine or oil presses were also found.

Qalatga Darband appears to have been occupied during the early Parthian period, which spanned from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D. According to Peter Dockrill of Science Alert, a coin discovered at the site depicts the Parthian king Orodes II, who ruled between 57 B.C. and 37 B.C.

The Parthians were a major power in the ancient Near East, conquering vast swaths of territory after successful campaigns against a number of powerful groups, including the Hellenistic Seleucids and the Romans. But artifacts from Qalatga Darband suggest that Greco-Roman influences were nevertheless pervasive in the region. Archaeologists have found statues of what appear to be the Greek goddess Persephone and the Greek god Adonis, along with terracotta roof tiles modeled in the Greco-Roman architectural tradition.

Excavations at Qalatga Darband are expected to continue until 2020. Archaeologists are also investigating two other nearby sites—Murad Rasu and Usu Aska—in the hopes of gaining a more robust picture of life in the region some 2,000 years ago.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new ... 180965028/

[Anthea]

Lost city in Iraq founded by Alexander the Great discovered by archaeologists

Drone photography used to unearth dormant ruins

Archaeologists in Iraq have discovered a city which was lost for more than 2,000 years with the help of drone photography and declassified intelligence images.

Qalatga Darband, which is believed to have been founded in 331 BC by Alexander the Great, was discovered by a team of Iraqi and British archaeologists led by experts from the British Museum.

John MacGinnis, who is leading the team on the ground, told The Times: “It’s early days, but we think it would have been a bustling city on a road from Iraq to Iran. You can imagine people supplying wine to soldiers passing through.”

The site of initially came to the attention of archaeologists following the release of declassified CIA satellite photos from the 1960s, which appeared to show the outline of ruins.

Dr MacGinnis and his colleagues then used drones to discover the outlines of buildings which have lain beneath the ground for centuries.

Greek coins, and statues of Greco-Roman deities, have also been found at the site in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Staff from the British Museum have been training Iraqi heritage experts in a government-funded scheme designed to help archaeologists protect sites of historical significance in areas of the Middle East which have been severely impacted by conflict.

The Emergency Heritage Management Training Programme have trained workers in advanced technqiues including global positioning systems, satellite imagery and geophysics.

Iraqi heritage services have been severely impacted by the chaos that followed the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 65651.html

[Anthea]

This is fantastic and it is in KURDISTAN

[Anthea]

In the field with Iraq's archaeologists of the future

Working in Kurdistan at the site of Qalatga Darband, The British Museum is training Iraqi archaeologists to preserve and study their country’s threatened heritage

Iraqi Kurdistan is spectacularly beautiful in April; the foothills of the Zagros Mountains break out in flowers, the barley shoots up in the valleys and everything is eye-wateringly green. Down by the calm waters of Lake Dokan, I’m trying to explain the mystery and wonder of single context excavation to a very nice man called Halkawt who works for the directorate of antiquities in Erbil. He’s enthusiastic, but his excavation experience is pretty limited so we’re very much starting on page one of practical archaeology.

I’m working on a project run by the British Museum aimed at training Iraqi and Kurdish antiquities staff in modern archaeological practice. It’s bankrolled by the Cultural Protection Fund; a £30 million pot set up by the British government to counter the destruction of cultural heritage in conflict zones, particularly as a response to the actions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
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The snappily-titled British Museum Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme brings small groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum, before sending them to one of two excavations set up by the Museum in Iraq for six more weeks of training in the field. The programme ranges from the very basics of archaeology to drone survey and 3D scanning. In total they hope to provide this training to fifty Iraqis over five years.

One of the two field projects set up in Iraq is Qalatga Darband, which roughly translates from Kurdish as ‘castle of the mountain pass’. The site guards a strategic gap in a chain of low mountains where they’re cut by the channel of the Lower Zab river. This is where Halkawt and I are sitting, contemplating a massive dry-stone Parthian city wall dating to the second or third century BC.

It’s an impressive structure, now mostly buried under earth and grass. It stretches from halfway up the mountainside to the north, across the modern road and the cultivation, down to where Lake Dokan (created by the Dokan Dam in the 1950s) has washed away its southern end, along with a good chunk of the ancient site. Every twenty metres or so the wall is interrupted by a square projecting tower and it’s one of these I’m currently excavating. The tower has grown a new crop of grass on top since I uncovered it last autumn and is now uncomfortably full of spring snakes.

I’m teaching Halkawt how to excavate in secure contexts, separating out each layer and structure and collecting the material separately from each. We’re practicing applying the recording system; giving the right numbers to deposits, samples and finds. We’re covering how to draw plans and calculate levels, how to take a decent photo. If I’m feeling brave at the end of the season we’ll try a Harris matrix. It’s all very basic stuff, but very necessary.

The Iraqi antiquities service was once one of the best in the Middle East with a proud tradition going back to Hormuzd Rassam, who directed excavations at Nineveh and Nimrud, and at many other sites in the late 1800s. During most of the twentieth century the antiquities service was active and well-funded; Iraq’s ancient past was seen as a source of national pride. This began to change as first the Iran-Iraq war, and then the sanction years which followed the Gulf War, drained Iraqi archaeology of money and international contact. Finally, the 2003 coalition invasion and the chaos which followed left Iraq’s heritage services in a very poor state.

After decades of under-resourcing and isolation, Iraqi archaeologists have been starved of the funding, training and equipment needed to conduct archaeology to modern standards. Ironically, this situation may have been improved by the actions of the Islamic State (Isis). Following the very public destruction of so much cultural heritage, western governments have been queuing up to offer money through initiatives similar to the UK’s Cultural Protection Fund.

But what could the money be used for? Once an archaeological site is looted or bulldozed there’s relatively little that can be done for it except tidy up a bit; to a large extent, the ancient material and the primary data are simply gone. Of course, many of the sites remain inaccessible so immediate action is not possible.

In any case, it’s no longer seen as acceptable for western archaeologists to wade-in to ‘save’ the archaeology of another country, dragging all that cultural imperialist baggage along with them. Instead the goal is to enable the country’s own heritage professionals to do the work themselves.

So, the answer comes in the form of training and support for Iraqi archaeologists, conservators and museum staff. As well as the British Museum’s programme, which is currently the most ambitious of its type, various training schemes have been set up with funding from western governments and from UNESCO. Only last month a new project was announced by the Smithsonian aiming to prepare Iraqi archaeologists to document and stabilise the recently liberated site of Nimrud, supported by $400,000 dollars from the US Department of State. One of the Iraqis who will take part is currently training with us here at Qalatga Darband.

Intentions are good and the direction of travel is positive, but it’s still a long road to fully reviving Iraqi archaeology. It takes years to properly train an archaeologist and there’s a limit to what can be achieved in the short timescale of the British Museum programme. In the long-run it will be down to our Iraqi colleagues to make the most of the support available now. In the future they will have to deal with the legacy left by Isis and previous conflicts, as well as acting as custodians to the heritage of one of the most archaeologically rich countries on earth.

In the meantime, I will be helping Halkawt to label his pottery buckets.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ga-darband

[Anthea]

This is what the lost city would have looked like