Timothy Matney

TIMOTHY MATNEY, University of Akron, Akron, Ohio, was awarded a grant in April 2023 to aid research on “The Sebittu Project: Deportees, Agrarian Economy and Environment in the Rural Hamlets and Farmsteads of Imperial Assyria.” This grant funded the first archaeological field season for the Sebittu Project in the Erbil Plains of the Kurdish Region in Iraq. The focus of this project are a cluster of seven small hamlets and farmsteads occupied during the Neo-Assyrian empire (early 1st millennium BC). The goals of the Sebittu Project are to shed light on the economy and environmental impact of agricultural intensification during the imperial period, as viewed from the perspective of commoners and deportees who occupied these small settlements and farmed the land. This bottom-up perspective and the focus on a settlement cluster rather than a single, isolated village are innovative approaches to a often neglected subject. The field season took place in fall 2022 with pedestrian surveys, geophysical prospection, and excavation at two sites. An important component of the fieldwork was the collection of zooarchaeological, paleobotanical, biomolecular, and trace element analyses for export and analysis. The excavations and sample analyses have already produced results showing that craft production and agrarian regimes appear to be quite different at contemporary sites found fewer than 4 km apart. These results, if upheld through expanded fieldwork, argue for a diversified and complex imperial economy with a higher site-level specialization than expected.