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2018 Sponsored Projects

Nippur Digitized: The University of Pennsylvania Excavations at Nippur 1889-1900.

The ancient city of Nippur, 32o07’ 35” N, 45o14’ 00” E in present-day Iraq, was founded sometime in the 6th millennium B.C. and was from the mid-third millennium until about 1800 B.C. the center of Sumerian civilization – the Sumerians themselves called the city “the bond between Heaven and Earth” – but it was occupied down to about 800 A.D. before it was finally abandoned....

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Archaeological Excavations at Satu Qala, the Ancient Idu, Fieldwork 2010-2013

Excavations at Satu Qala (Erbil, Iraq), identified with the Assyrian provincial capital Idu, highlighted for the first time the role of the region located south-east of Erbil, as a multicultural borderland both between Assyria and Babylonia and between the eastern valley of the Tigris and the region beyond the Zagros. Fieldwork conducted between 2010 and...

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Tbilisi II - The Iron Age of Treligorebi, Treli and Nakubakevi

This grant is to enable publication of the final report of a series of excavations of Iron Age burials within Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. The project is jointly run with Mr. Mikhei Abramishvili, of the Georgian National Museum, who with his father, the late Rostom Abramishvili, excavated the sites in question. The sites are all anomalous compared to other Iron Age burials from the area and certain aspects of the finds...

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The Pre-pottery Neolithic A Site of Zahrat Adh-'Dhra 2 and the Dawn of Farming by the Dead Sea

The Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) site of Zahrat Adh-'Dhra 2 lies on the barren and deeply dissected Dhra‘ Plain, at the south-east corner of the Dead Sea in Jordan. However, in its heyday (9,200 - 8,300 cal BC) during the early Holocene, the settlement lay in a more congenial setting beside the alluvial fan of the ancestral Wadi adh-Dhra‘. Zahrat adh-Dhra‘ 2 was excavated by a La Trobe University team between 1999 and 2002.  As one of the final PPNA sites in the southern Levant... Read more about The Pre-pottery Neolithic A Site of Zahrat Adh-'Dhra 2 and the Dawn of Farming by the Dead Sea

The Amulets of the Kerma Culture

Kerma is an archaeological site located in the largest alluvial plain of the northern Sudan, upstream of the Third Cataract in Upper Nubia. G. A. Reisner, director of the Harvard-Boston Expedition, was the first to excavate parts of the site, including the cemetery with the royal tumuli and associated funerary chapels, between 1913 and 1916. Later on, extensive excavations were undertaken at Kerma by C. Bonnet from 1977 and, subsequently, from 2002, by M. Honegger. Kerma and the archaeological culture named after it certainly played a relevant role in the history of Northeastern Africa... Read more about The Amulets of the Kerma Culture