Gird-i-Begum (Irakisch-Kurdistan)
In the summer of 2022 a team from Freie Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, began renewed excavations at the site of Gird-i Begum in the Shahrizor Plain. The site had been briefly investigated twice before, once by an Iraqi team in 1960 led by Muhammad Ali Mustafa and once in 2013 by the late Dr. Olivier Nieuwenhuyse, who had planned a long-term project at the site.
Gird-i Begum is approximately 5 ha in size and is composed of a high mound that reaches 20 meters above the level of the surrounding plain and an elongated lower mound that stretches to the south. The principal occupation of the site was in the Late Neolithic/Halaf and Chalcolithic (Ubaid and Late Chalcolithic) periods, that is from the late 6th through the mid-4th mill. BCE, although sporadic occupation in later times is also attested.
The current project seeks to investigate the settlement history of Gird-i Begum, subsistence practices, strategies of resource procurement and circulation, and changes in these practices and strategies over time. Special attention is devoted to the concept of mobility, in terms of the acquisition and circulation of materials, people, animals, plans, and ideas as well as spatial and temporal shifts in settlement. These investigations are embedded in a conceptual framework that seeks to understand the way in which past communities coped with potential crises instigated by sociocultural as well as physical-environmental conditions and interactions among them.
