Thin End of the Wedge
Thin End of the Wedge
77. Augusta McMahon: Excavations at Nippur
Augusta talks about the new excavations at Nippur. What are the goals of the new work, and how does she manage the long history of excavations at the site? What are the long term plans for the site? She reveals the first results, including news about the city walls, a huge Neo-Babylonian villa, and a Parthian cemetery. She reflects on how the archaeological situation has changed since she was a student. And she discusses plans for sharing the results of the work.
3:13 why Nippur?
5:26 project goals
8:11 working around previous excavations
12:09 first results
15:39 a Neo-Babylonian villa
19:40 searching for Ur III
22:18 Kassite Nippur
24:06 the dig team
27:14 Neo-Babylonian graves
29:18 challenges
35:19 long term plans
39:11 publication
Music by Ruba Hillawi
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Hello, and welcome to the Thin End of the Wedge, the podcast where experts from around the world share new and interesting stories about life in the ancient Middle East. My name is Jon. Each episode, I talk to friends and colleagues and get them to explain their work in a way we can all understand. Nippur is one of the most famous sites in Mesopotamian history. Perhaps best known as the sacred heart of the Sumerian world, the city enjoyed a life maybe 5000 years long. More than a century of excavations there revealed the remains of great temples, as well as tablets documenting education in the second millennium and banking in the first. A new series of excavations has started at Nippur. Interests have changed, and new types of research question are being designed. In the 21st century, new challenges face archaeology in Iraq. Our guest is an experienced field archaeologist, who now leads the new excavations at Nippur. She explains her plans, the results so far, and how it all works in 2025. So get yourself a cup of tea, make yourself comfortable, and let's meet today's guest. Hello and welcome to Thin End of the Wedge. Thank you for joining us.
Augusta McMahon:Thank you for the invitation. I'm excited to have a chat.
Jon Taylor:Could you tell us please: who are you, and what do you do?
Augusta McMahon:I'm Augusta McMahon. I'm a Mesopotamian archaeologist. That means I work in what is now traditionally Mesopotamia, or in Iraq and northeast Syria. My research focuses on ancient cities. Mesopotamia is the region which has the earliest cities in the world, particularly looking at the past lived experience of people who live in cities, urban dwellers. Whether that's their neighbourhood interactions as they walk around in streets and plazas, or their daily routines as they do housework or work for the state. And also what employment opportunities they have and how that potentially changes over time. I was at the University of Cambridge for 27 years in the department of archaeology there. And about two and a half years ago, I moved to the University of Chicago. I used to be the field director of the Tell Brak excavation in northeast Syria. That ceased in 2011 because of global political issues. And now I am the director of the Nippur excavation in south Iraq.
Jon Taylor:And you're freshly back from the spring season, aren't you?
Augusta McMahon:Yes, we just had a two month long season from January to middle of March. It was an absolutely excellent field excavation. Got some amazing results. The team was absolutely incredible; one of the best teams I've ever worked with. And we're just very, very happy to relaunch the excavations at Nippur.
Jon Taylor:Okay, I'm excited to hear more detail. We should start though with, why Nippur?
Augusta McMahon:Nippur is probably best known as an important religious centre within Sumer, within south Iraq. It's the city of which the patron deity is Enlil, who is the god of winds and air, and is really one of the chief deities within the Mesopotamian pantheon in the third millennium BCE. There's a number of temples. There is an actual ziggurat and a temple to Enlil on the site, which we can come back to later. We're not actually digging there yet, but there might be a conservation project there. There are a number of other important temples there. There's Ninurta, Inanna. There's a number of sort of big religious institutions there. But it's also an important city and an important economic centre as well as a religious centre. And it has incredibly long occupation from at least the Ubaid period around, probably around 6000 BCE, right the way through most of the first volume BCE. And there's also Sassanian and early Islamic occupation there as well, and Parthian occupation. So clearly there's... it's a city to which a lot of people have this very, very long connection with and sense of belonging. It's also an amazing case study for the expansion and contraction of urban size and urban scale over time, depending on things like political events and political churn, and also climate change as well. We know of a sequence of political expansions and collapses, and also particular climate change events. And those can actually be studied directly at Nippur as those have an effect on just the size and diversity of the city. So it's an amazing place to dig. It also happens to be a very, very long-term University of Chicago project. So in many ways, I kind of inherited it when I moved to the University of Chicago. Obviously, this is dependent on the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq. And so we had to develop a five year plan of what we would actually do in order to have the permit renewed. It's just an incredible, exciting, dynamic place to be doing research.
Ellie Bennett:Really exciting. So what are the goals for the current excavations, then?
Augusta McMahon:Okay, so our current goal is a little bit off-beat, given that when you walk onto Nippur, the most important building is the ziggurat. And you know that's the thing that Nippur is the best known for. We're actually concentrating on the city edge zone in what I'm calling the southern suburb. So you walk onto the city and there's the enormous mound, and there's a big channel ... water channel that runs through the middle. And all the best-known excavations are on this high mound. But we're actually working on an area which is a very, very low, mounded part of the site, which is down to the south. In part because there's some interesting things that are happening there. So during the Ur III period, so late third millennium BCE, in the Kassite period, so mid- to later second millennium BC, and again in the Neo-Babylonian period, so in the second half of the first millennium BCE. The city has been consciously expanded in each one of those time periods by the regional or national government. And in part what's happening is there's a rebuilding on the big temples, but that comes with also sort of revitalisation of the city, and expansion of its population and increased diversity of its population as well. And what we can see in the southern suburb is that's a sort of optimal area for people who are basically haven't lived there before, right? You get immigration, migration inward for either job opportunities with the regional administration. You know, they're rebuilding the temples. So there's a whole bunch of new positions as scribes and administrators within the temple institutions. But also potentially people who are coming to lay bricks for the state. You know, build the city wall, make pottery for all the new people who are showing up. So that just the job opportunities and employment opportunities just have this huge uplift. And so where are these people going to live when they arrive to a city which has this long established tradition of other people who've been living there? It tends to be that people move into the suburbs of this sort of city edge zone. So that's what we're looking at. It's actually this city edge zone. And how is that used? How is it framed? Is it originally open space. Once you would get these expansions, is this very crowded with disenfranchised, poor people, or is it? And it turns out, in some cases, it actually turns out to be where it's more like a garden suburb, where you have these enormous villas, because the wealthy have new space where they can come in and build ideal houses. So that's what we're looking at to just investigate the diversity of the urban edge zone.
Jon Taylor:You have this fantastic site with a very long history of excavations. How does your current work fit with those previous campaigns? Is it in some way related, or have you made a conscious break to look at this very different type of archaeology?
Augusta McMahon:Nippur is, you know, one of these famous poisoned chalices where it's an amazing, amazing site, but also has this history of excavation since the 1890s. And so there was a massive University of Pennsylvania project in the 1890s, which has left a legacy of enormous holes and also enormous spoil heaps and dumps all over the site. So it can be a real challenge to work around those. The publication of that University of Pennsylvania excavation campaign is also sometimes a little bit inadequate according to modern... modern standards, let's say. There are also significant excavations from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s onwards, which have been variously much better published, but also have left a different kind of legacy on the site. So that means that if you want to really start over, right, one is restricted in terms of where you actually excavate and what target research questions one has. And in part, that's why we are targeting this southern suburb or southern extension, because there's been less excavation there. That said there have been excavations there in the 1970s and 1980s by my predecessor, McGuire Gibson, that have been variously published. And what we're doing is building on those to a great extent. So from those excavations, we do know that this southern suburb was first occupied in the Ur III period. There's nothing prior to that. And also that the earliest Ur III occupation does seem to be from one excavation, one very small excavation, possibly sort of smaller houses of disenfranchised people. So we want to simply excavate more of the early Ur III occupation to see if that one very small excavation is representative of what's happening in the larger area. We also know from the 1970s and 1980s excavations where the more or less where the Ur III city wall is in one place, right? The city wall is actually, it's known to have been built by Ibbi-Sin in his sixth year. So this is the final king of the Ur III dynasty. And so we know that this Ur III city wall was built basically over the top of some earlier Ur III houses. So we have the Ur III occupation sequence, but only in one tiny area. So we're looking at that and trying to see what the actual extent and the plan of the Ur III city wall is. We also know from the 1970s and 80s excavations that in the Kassite period, there was a big villa-like building down in this southern suburb. But again, we want to see if that was representative, or if, basically that was one building, and then there's a whole bunch of other little Kassite shacks around, or there's open space. The interesting thing about the Kassite period is we do have this Kassite map of Nippur, which is now in the Hilprecht collection, that seems to show... it shows basically, it's like a plan of the entire site, including the ziggurat and the Shatt an-Nil, which is the water course, which runs through the middle. And city walls that go around in this area of the southern suburb, it is labelled"gardens in the city". And it would be nice to see that,
right? {L:AUGHS} Are there genuinely gardens and small fields and garden agriculture to go with this one villa that we know of from the early excavations. And so we're looking at that as well, just to expand our picture on that and building on this earlier documentation and earlier excavation. So we're working with the more ... the most recent excavations, and trying as much as possible to avoid the massive holes and dumps from the very early University of Pennsylvania excavations ... working on that.
Ellie Bennett:I guess the key question is whether you've actually been able to do that. Have you been able to find these gardens and villas and see if those finds in the 70s were representative?
Augusta McMahon:So far, we've just had really one season of excavation. So we're just getting started on this project. What we have found so far is we put in two large trench areas, let's say. One of which actually did uncover the city wall, and another which did actually uncover a big house. And I'll talk through those separately, right? The first trench that we put in, you can actually see in the low mounds within the area that we chose, you can actually more or less see the line of what might possibly be the city wall. Okay, so we did start a 10 by 10 there, and we found immediately below, almost below the surface, a fabulous city wall. It's about three meters wide, preserved at maximum about one and a half meters high. And as we dug for several weeks, we were thinking that that was the Ur III city wall, because, of course, that's the one that is documented in the texts. And that was the best preserved wall that was actually exposed in the 1970s and 1980s excavations. But as we dug down and dug down, we kept finding Kassite material{LAUGHS} and thinking, "Oh, well, this is possibly reuse of the city walls, early Kassite re-use of the Ur III city wall when they were doing whatever else they were doing". Ultimately, we had to completely change our minds and decide that, in fact, this was the Kassite city wall, not the Ur III city wall. So we have the Kassite city wall, which is brand new. It was not really known of before. The Kassite city wall in the other excavations was significantly eroded, and roughly we knew more or less that it was there. But this new excavation actually has the whole thing.
Ellie Bennett:Oh, that's exciting, though.
Augusta McMahon:Yeah, oh very exciting. We were really hoping for the Ur III city wall, but the Kassite city wall, this is fine. And it takes a kind of zigzag to deal with a major erosion channel that runs through this area of the trenches that we had. But then as we dug down, we finally got to the bottom of this Kassite city wall. What we found immediately below that was the Ur III city wall. So at least we did find that.
Ellie Bennett:Yay!
Augusta McMahon:Yes, yay.{LAUGHS} It was unfortunately kind of damaged by this weird erosion channel that we had that sort of cut through that must belong to either the very late third millennium or the early second millennium BC. So probably during the Isin-Larsa time period, this area is abandoned, and the Ur III city wall actually just has this like massive erosion channel that cuts through the middle, and then the Kassite city wall is then built over the top of that. So clearly something of the Ur III city wall was still visible when the Kassite engineers and architects came in to basically use that as a foundation. So we did find that. And as we then dug down, because, you know, this is our target, we were looking for these potential Ur III houses that were below the Ur III city wall, what we found was another big Ur III piece of architecture, let's say. We still have to examine that. We literally found that in the last two days of excavation. So we have this stack of at least two city walls and then something else Ur III that is actually below that. So that's what we have of that so far. Ideally we would, you know, have found houses, and be able to look at diversity and mobility and who is actually living in this area in the Ur III and the Kassite period. But we haven't. We haven't quite gotten to that yet. Then the other excavation area that we have initially, we had placed the trench sort of nearest to where there was this big Kassite villa, thinking that we would be able to see, does that Kassite villa have neighbours? Is there, again, gardens or some kind of farming or something out in this general area? We were expecting to find Kassite at the basically, sort of right below the surface, in part because when we did a very casual survey of the area, pretty much all the ceramics were Kassite. Kassite and Ur III. So we started digging, and we found, pretty quickly, right below the surface a big house, it looks like, again, a big villa. Looked pretty similar to this Kassite villa, but it turned out to be Neo-Babylonian. Not what we were expecting, not really initially part of our research plan, but something which absolutely we can embrace. This is fine. It turned out that we actually then expanded this trench so we have about 200 square meters at least, of excavation, and found this absolutely enormous Neo-Babylonian house with ... what it looks like a couple of different courtyard spaces within it. It's hard to explain without actually showing a map. You know, I'm always used to doing lectures with the PowerPoint right behind me. But there were two pairs of parallel rectangular spaces, one of which is roofed, and the other which is unroofed. So two courtyards that are slightly offset from each other that make it look as if it's potentially the house or the household of two brothers, or a very extended family, where you have almost like two families with their own sets of semi-public and semi-private space within it. But it is all one absolutely enormous house with just room after room after room. We only found the exterior wall on the west side, and even though we expanded our trenches and expanded we never actually got the northeast or southern full extent of this house, which is now over 200 meters squared. Then the interesting thing that we found further west of that is we found a little street, which is amazing. I love streets. Again, that's one of the most overlooked and under examined contexts within Mesopotamian archaeology. But, you know, they're full of this amazing trash and just enormous amounts of sort of scientific data that you can explore and think through. So there is a street that's on the essentially along the western extent of this house, and immediately on the other side of the street, we actually found another city wall. So we found the first millennium, the Neo-Babylonian city wall there as well, and this little space in between. So this big Neo-Babylonian villa is essentially right next to the city wall as it exists in the neo-Babylonian period. But the interesting thing about the Neo-Babylonian wall is it actually re-uses the Kassite wall. So what we found was essentially like a kind of casemate arrangement in which the interior wall was built in the Neo-Babylonian period, but the exterior wall is actually the re-used Kassite wall. So anyway, the upshot of all this is we can now more or less trace the city wall along quite a significant distance between the 1970s and 1980s excavations that touched on it in a few places, our own excavations. Plus we actually had a colleague from the University of Pennsylvania, Emily Hammer, who did magnetometry in this whole area and has managed to track the line of the city wall between our excavations, and also significantly on either side as well. And outside of that, it turns out that there's a moat or a water channel, which is about 50 meters wide on the outside of that which she has also managed to track in this magnetometry. So that's our main result, is we're starting to get to grips with the occupation of this southern suburb at various times, very preliminary stage for the Ur III and the Kassite period, a little bit more for the Neo-Babylonian period. But gives us an amazing foundation for further work in the next few years.
Jon Taylor:This is all very exciting, isn't it? There's, I guess, lots of bonuses for you. Your original goal was to look for Ur III. And with the other city walls and this huge Neo-Babylonian house, how are you going to deal with that? Will you remove part of it? Will you extend to try and work around it? How will you confront that?
Augusta McMahon:Yeah, so within the city wall excavation, we can continue to dig down quite easily. So we're actually leaving each of the city walls that we find. We're actually leaving those and not removing those at the moment. We do have space inside them to continue down and hopefully to target the Ur III period. Unfortunately, in that particular area, there is some erosion. There's a bit of a ridge, so we should actually be fairly near to the Ur III period, even though it's a little bit hard to explain. Potentially, the Neo-Babylonian is completely eroded in that area. And the Kassite architecture in that area also seems to be extremely minimal, so we can probably get to the Ur III period pretty easily without actually having to remove anything. That said, the one thing that I forgot to say was we also found a Parthian cemetery in this area. This is, again, not really part of our research questions, but is very interesting. Nippur is an amazing city. In the Parthian period, there's a huge fortress around the ziggurrat. There's a big, a quite big town, or Parthian city, on the west mound. And then in this southern suburban area is where the cemetery is. And between the various trenches that we have, we have, I think, more than 60 Parthian burials. They are very, very close to the surface and unfortunately, very, very badly, badly damaged and kind of eroded and not in particularly good condition. But that's our main thing that overlies the Ur III period occupation within the city wall excavation. In the Neo-Babylonian house excavation, we're probably going to cut through that. What we'll do is actually expand the trenches so we can actually see the entire house. We want to get right to the actual edges of it, so we can get a sense of, like, what the exterior is, is the street along the west edge also? You know, are there also streets or alleys and then nearby structures on the other sides? What is surrounding the actual house? And we still need an entrance. We don't even know how they got into the house, either. So we want the front door. We want the back door. We want just to understand a lot more about circulation within the house itself. So we'll do that. Certainly expand out and try to expose the entirety of the house as well. But then ideally, we will simply remove that and excavate down into what I'm assuming is probably Kassite, given the quantity of Kassite pottery that we actually have sort of up-churned into the Neo-Babylonian structure. In some of the contexts, we had actually more Kassite pottery than Neo-Babylonian pottery. Just because, you know, they're constantly digging pits, or there's kind of up-churn of ceramics from the earlier occupation. So we assume there's Kassite occupation immediately below. But that's, again, we're braced for being surprised, and there not being anything there, but I'm sure there was something Kassite below it for sure, whether this is houses or some kind of fields or gardens, remains to be seen.
Jon Taylor:I imagine your epigrapher will be very pleased if you find Kassite.
Augusta McMahon:Yes, yes, indeed. {LAUGHS} We did have ... we have Susanna Paulus, who is our main epigrapher. We also have a number of other epigraphers who are part of the team, and a large part of the students as well. The students from the University of Chicago who are part of the team are actually cuneiform students. So we are well braced if we find any tablets. That said, I'm happy they're all there, because there's nothing like having a whole bunch of epigraphers on the team to make sure you don't find any tablets. {LAUGHS} We did not do. We found one inscribed sherd, which actually Susanna found when we were walking around near the ziggurat near the neighborhood area; the Tablet Hill area. She did find an inscribed sherd out of the millions and millions of sherds on the surface. Trust our epigrapher to find one inscribed sherd. And then we found ... there was an Ur III tablet that was actually found, again, just on the surface, a little economic tablet. So that was our two epigraphic finds from this last year, both of which were surface finds and interesting, but not really significant for our goals.
Ellie Bennett:It sounds like you're very well placed for any cuneiform finds. Do you have any other expertise on your team?
Augusta McMahon:Yes, so we pretty much cover all the bases. So we have five Iraqi colleagues from the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, who are working with us. Many of whom have very, very deep and very diverse excavation experience as well. So they were absolutely key members of the team in terms of us working out things like stratigraphy and architecture and so on. Our students also. So there are students from the University of Chicago and the University of Cambridge. You know, the younger generation, who just simply have an innate ability at grappling with data collection, say. What we do in terms of our recording in the field is we actually use high resolution GPS receivers, these Emlid Reach receivers, which give centimetre level control. They're connected directly to laptop computers and a whole sort of complicated database. And so the students, not only are they, they have excellent excavation experience, but they're also good at grappling with all the potential issues that can arise if you're trying to do digital data collection in the field, with wind and rain, dirt and so on. They managed to deal with that unbelievably professionally. We also have an excellent data manager, a dedicated data manager who also does things like photogrammetry and so on. We have these epigraphic experts. We have an archaeozoologist--my colleague, Tina Greenfield from the University of Manitoba, who also works with isotope analyses as well. And isotopes can give us information about mobility and diet of both animals and humans. Then Emily Hammer of the University of Pennsylvania is an expert in magnetometry, in general sort of landscape interpretation. We also do more traditional interpretation of ceramic assemblages. My colleague, Luca Volpi, who's at the University of Madrid and University of Rome, and I are working on the ceramics. And then also people who are looking at material culture analyses and so on. So we have a pretty good range. We do not have an archaeobotanist yet, in part because there are challenges with flotation and archaeobotany in general in south Iraq, because of salinity and preservation and so on. So we're looking for a potential archaeobotanist. We also don't have yet a human remains analyst, though we have saved all the human remains from the Parthian cemetery, and also from the ... we have a couple of Neo-Babylonian graves as well. We've saved all of that, and those have all been comprehensively documented in terms of, again, photographs and photogrammetry as well. So those are the sort of two experts that we lack at the moment. But no, we find that we have a pretty good range of expertise. There's nothing that we really find like, oh, we we can't do this. We can pretty much deal with almost anything.
Ellie Bennett:Wow. That's a massive range. And I hope you are able to fill those gaps in the ...was it archaeobotany and human remains?
Augusta McMahon:Archaeobotany and human remains are our two acknowledged gaps at the moment.
Ellie Bennett:And I'd love, just really quickly ... can you talk more about the neo-Babylonian graves?.
Augusta McMahon:Yeah. So what we had were basically three coffin burials within the house itself. One was in one of the traditional bathtub coffins. One was actually in a round or oval coffin, and then there was another. There were actually, in fact, two others, but they were badly crushed and damaged. And one was probably in a bathtub coffin, and the other one maybe in some other kind of vessel. The two that were the best preserved did have adult remains in them, together with these little glazed jars that are quite common in elite households, elite house contexts. In terms of just being above your average everyday vessel. Little glazed jars that have this kind of flower petals and little things, almost like little bulls eyes on them in this beautiful yellow and white glaze, in one case. And another one was actually just kind of like all entirely green as well. So these beautiful little glazed jars, they also sometimes come with a few beads and so on. That reinforces that what we're looking at is an elite household, rather than just a large poor household. The material culture that we have from the house also includes things like incense burners, fragments of incense burners, and these glazed jars. It just reinforces that this is a household that has access to elite material culture and so on. Interestingly, the diet, also in terms of the archaeozoological remains, also reinforces that. So they have the usual sheep, goat, pig, you know, the normal kind of diet, but quite a lot of animal remains, and also quite a lot of wild animals as well. So they were hunting deer and doing a lot of fishing and yanking turtles out of the Euphrates and so on. So the diet was really quite varied. That, again, reinforces this idea of an elite household was living there. You know, basically that is played out in terms of these graves that we have.
Ellie Bennett:You've painted this really complex picture of a really interesting site. So I'm wondering if there have been any challenges that you've faced with organising these excavations.
Augusta McMahon:There are always challenges. Working in Iraq can be unpredictable, because of just global politics and internal bureaucracy. The biggest challenges on the site, as I said, are really the previous excavations and trying to extract the maximum information from those. And to work around things like spoil heaps and so on that are left behind from legacy excavations. And while it's enormously valuable to have all those legacy excavations, so we know so much about the occupation of the site, that still means that sometimes you think "Gosh. It would be great to dig right there, but there is an absolutely enormous spoil heap on top of that". That's one of the main challenges. There are always challenges. Working in Iraq can be unpredictable, because of just global politics and internal bureaucracy. The biggest challenges on the site, as I said, are really the previous excavations and trying to extract the maximum information from those. And to work around things like spoil heaps and so on that are left behind from legacy excavations. And while it's enormously valuable to have all those legacy excavations, so we know so much about the occupation of the site, that still means that sometimes you think "Gosh. It would be great to dig right there, but there is an absolutely enormous spoil heap on top of that". That's one of the main challenges. And the winter is really ideal. That said, you get rain. So we lost a few days to very, very heavy rain. That just turns the the entirety of south Iraq into this sort of clay swamp. We also, unusually this time around, also had a few days where it was well below freezing, so we would wake up and in the house, all the water pipes were frozen. That's unusual to get that cold, but that can also happen. Climate change doesn't just mean warming, it means a higher degree of fluctuation. So the weather is always a challenge. That said, also global politics can be a challenge as well. This was technically meant to be our second season in 2025. We did attempt to have a season in 2024, but we had to evacuate quite rapidly because of a threat, a specific threat against us that did not have to do with anything that we had to do. But we are deemed to be an American project, and the global political situation made it unsafe for Americans to be there. That said, our project is actually international. We have Iraqis, we have Spanish, Italian, Canadian, German, you know, people from all over. And technically, this is an international project, not an American one, but of course, it is associated with an American institution, and that comes with a certain amount of just political baggage that we have to be careful and diplomatic about. Having been there now for two months this last season, you know, we've developed very close and positive relations with a number of people around in the area, and I hope that we will have a positive association, rather than this being a problem again in future.
Jon Taylor:Thank you. I mean, I think you touched there on what was going to be my next question in that you have this very long archaeological experience. And the situation is slightly different now from the last time Chicago was excavating at Nippur. You have the international situation, obviously is different, and with climate change. But are there any other differences you've noticed working in Iraq nowadays from how things used to be?
Augusta McMahon:I still fondly remember in the 1980s you know, the possibility to travel around on your own. And I didn't do too much of that, but I still remember, you know, when I was a student, I arrived in Baghdad, I was a little bit late arriving after the rest of the team were already at Nippur. And they didn't know I was there. And so I arrived in Baghdad, and basically I just ... I went to the bus station, and I took a bus from Baghdad to Diwaniyah, and then found a medical student from the University of Hatra, who was driving a taxi. And we drove down from Diwaniyah to try to find where Nippur were was. And you can't do that kind of thing anymore. I mean, it was a positive experience, you know, I learned a lot, but the ability to travel around on one's own is not really possible anymore. We do have with us at all times, various sets of security police, basically for our own safety, not because of any kind of issue. This is just kind of normal to have a contingent of antiquities police who guard the site and guard us as a team, and also a SWAT team that basically assures our personal safety. This is all positive. Usually they're very, very friendly guys. You know, we talk about archaeology, we wander out in the site together and so on. They're there doing their job, and I'm not sure they're really that necessary. But that does mean there's a certain there's a degree of layers of bureaucracy if we then want to go and visit a colleague. So when we go to we went to visit Uruk, we went to visit Babylon, we went to Kish. Every time one travels around, you have to organise this with you know which police are going to come with us to guard us en route. And that's different. It's a different political world than it used to be even in the 1980s. And the first time I was there was actually during the Iran-Iraq War, and yet I still managed to, like I said, take a bus from Baghdad to Diwaniyah without anyone really caring, right? It's also, I think, a more litigious time as well, and so can't imagine allowing any of my students to do that at the moment. I'd be too worried for their personal safety, because there is this larger world in which we're operating now where we just have to be respectful and careful and diplomatic to an extent which is ... you know, which is very, very positive, but also has its constraints as well.
Ellie Bennett:So what are the longer term plans for the site? I'm expecting that you're wanting to return.
Augusta McMahon:Yes.
Ellie Bennett:What's the future of Nippur in your mind?
Augusta McMahon:Alright, so at the moment, we have a five year permit. And we're in technically we've just finished the second year of that, so we only have one year of excavation. So we have another three years. I want to continue working in this southern suburb for at least next year and probably the year after that. I really do want to get down to that Ur III initial occupation to look at that diversity of peoples in this edge zone. We're also hoping to add in some geomorphological studies, both of the Shatt an-Nil, which runs through the centre--the water course, which runs through the centre of the city. And also this new watercourse, moat, canal, whatever it is, which is on the western edge of the site. And do some geomorphological studies there, potentially with local colleagues at the University of Qadisiyah, to look at the variations in that water course in terms of how much water there is, how fast it's flowing, the kind of health of the water system during these time periods in which we have expansion and contraction. So hoping to add that in. Eventually also going to excavate somewhere on the main mounds as well. In part this is... we're sort of waiting to see what the optimal place for that might be. We're also being encouraged by the local Department of Antiquities and by the Antiquities Department of Diwaniyah province as well to further develop the site for tourism. Diwaniyah province doesn't have a lot of other places where tourists might go, other than Nippur. And I have to say that sort of signage and the tourist experience at Nippur is not really ... is sub-optimal, let's say. Sort of working on small things initially. Think, better tourist signage. We want to get an archaeo trail app pulled together so that people can actually zap a QR code on a sign and then be guided around the site for when we're not there. This also involves some conservation preservation on the ziggurat as well, which has very badly eroded, again, due to climate change, due to rain, but particularly from wind and sandstorms, has eroded the ziggurat quite a bit. And so one of the things we're hoping to do is actually some preservation and conservation on the ziggurat That will also involve some excavation near the ziggurat as well, because a lot of the ziggurat has eroded down. And so the base of the ziggurat is now surrounded by eroded soil from the top of it. So we'll be doing some excavation around the ziggurat as well, in terms of just working that out and working out the optimal conservation preservation project. That is very long term, that also requires a separate conservation permit, which we don't have yet, but which I'm in the process of applying for. And once that's pulled together, that would be another five year overlapping project just to grapple with that. And then what I hope is, at the end of our five year excavation permit, I'll apply for another five years for either potential continuation of the same project or something which is related, but slightly different, that is related to whatever we're finding but we'll hopefully find in the next three years. So we get, we'll build on the first five years of excavation for the next five year permit. At that point, I might be close to retirement {LAUGHS}, so that, it would depend on who of the next generation might be willing to take on, therefore that stage, but you know, all remains to be seen. You know, it depends on a number of other factors what happens at the end of those two five year, hopefully, permits.
Ellie Bennett:My fingers are crossed for you. That end goal sounds wonderful.
Jon Taylor:Yeah, yeah. Before we let you go, Augusta, I would like to ask about publication. So I guess, firstly, where can we read more about the work you've been doing so far? But then secondly, what's your overall plan for disseminating the results of the work you do to the various audiences who might be interested?
Augusta McMahon:So far, I'm actually right now working on a preliminary report of that first excavation season that will go into a journal. I haven't really quite targeted that yet, because this is very preliminary stages of this. Also, I have a short report for a more general audience, which will be in the institute called News and Notes, the Institute for Study of Ancient Cultures here at the University of Chicago, we have a general newsletter, and there will be a report, a very preliminary report, very general report in that. And that is available online once it's actually pulled together. I just submitted that, so I think it will be out in three or four weeks or so, and that's available online. We'll also be putting together and adding information to the website as well. There is a Nippur project website, but it is, at the moment, a little bit out of date, I'll say. A little bit defunct in terms of actual activity there, but we will actually put something up there as well. There is a YouTube video of a lecture that I gave a couple of years ago with all the plans. This was before we actually went to the field, but does actually have my plans and hopes and vision for the project, and that is available on the ISAC YouTube channel as well, if you want an extended version of that. You know, things were at the planning stage at that point. So there's nothing about the results because we had not yet been in the field, but at least it gives information about the larger setting of what it is that we're doing. We're also hoping to give more public lectures in Iraq itself. We haven't yet had a chance to do that. Education of local stakeholders. Obviously, we talk a lot with our workmen. Some of the workmen are quite interested in and very knowledgeable about the history of Mesopotamia, even though, in the schools, there seems to be variable degrees of education within the local schools about local history and so on. But many of them, actually, they know and will talk to you about the Ur III period, or the Parthians and so on. And so we do a lot of education at the same time we're actually doing excavation. We hope to do more, potentially, interaction in the local schools. We have school groups come out and walk around and look at our excavations, and also the in the local universities as well. A number of us from the team did actually go to the University of Qadisiyah. Their archaeology department there runs an annual conference with local archaeologists and any foreign archaeologists who are in country at the time. So we did do a little bit of local dissemination of our results. That was in mid-February, so we had only really had about half of the season, and so we'll hope to go back to that next year and in future years as well. So a variety of different academic conferences, also hopefully school groups, and this variety of different degrees of publication, including traditional academic ones, but also more web-based versions as well, and more general dissemination to the public also.
Jon Taylor:Well, super. Thank you very much indeed. And good luck with the rest of the project.
Ellie Bennett:Good luck.
Augusta McMahon:Alright, thank you.
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