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Excavations at Tell Brak 2001–2002: Preliminary report

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

Geoff Emberling ,
Helen McDonald ,
Michael Charles ,
Mette Marie Hald ,
Piotr Michalowski ,
Holly Pittman ,
Lynn Rainville ,
Eric Rupley ,
Heidi Underbjerg  and
Jill Weber
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Extract

Excavation at Tell Brak during 2001 and 2002, the twenty-first and twenty-second seasons of work at the site, continued research on occupation of the fourth and third millennia BC, periods in which Brak is known to have been particularly important in regional and interregional political and economic interactions. Work on the fourth millennium BC focused on two interrelated questions: the size and complexity of the local Late Chalcolithic (Northern Middle Uruk) city and the effects of the arrival of settlers from southern Mesopotamia as a part of the “Uruk expansion”. In addressing the second of these questions, we opened two new areas (TX and UA, Fig. 1) that appeared from surface finds to preserve in situ Late Uruk occupation. Our work on the mid- to late third-millennium occupation has focused on Area TC, which centres on a large building complex of the late Early Dynastic period and overlying levels. The curving southern wall of the building led us to term it the “Brak Oval”; the excavated portion of the building is a large-scale bakery with facilities for storing and grinding grain and a series of rooms arranged around an interior courtyard, although it so far appears to be a few curves short of a full oval. We have now recovered around 250 seal impressions from a variety of contexts in the building itself. The size of the building and the use of seals within it suggested that it might be part of a larger architectural complex, such as a palace or temple, and in the past two seasons we looked for a continuation of the building to the north and west. We also investigated earlier stages of the Oval's construction and excavated overlying buildings, the latest of which is a domestic structure made of pisé that dates to the end or just after the end of the Akkadian period.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 65 , 2003 , pp. 1 - 75
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2003

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