The Buccellatis’ finds from the excavation of Urkesh (4000 BCE) reveal the intricate relationship between artifacts, the dirt they are found in, and the digital tools employed to decipher their meaning.
When, on October 27, 1984, we first approached Tell Mozan for the start of our excavations, we were faced with nothing more than a hill, altogether mute as to any potential glorious history hidden under its slopes. To be sure, we had gathered clues to that effect. We even suspected that it might be a forgotten ancient city, known from historical and mythological texts. But could we ever find out?
Well, find out we did, almost with a vengeance, you might say. First came the monuments: a high temple; a sprawling royal palace; a deep necromantic shaft. And then, the written evidence that gave us, one after the other, a series of names of kings and queens and their officials and, most important of all, the name of the ancient city itself, Urkesh. It took us ten years of excavation: it was all we had hoped for, and more. It turned out that Urkesh was one of the first cities in history, dating back to the early fourth millennium BC; that it was one of the largest in the region for these early periods; and that it was a flourishing center of a little-known culture, that of the Hurrians.
Author
Giorgio Buccellati is Research Professor in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures and in the Department of History at UCLA. He founded the Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, of which he served as first director from 1973 until 1983 and where he is now Director of the Mesopotamian Lab. He is currently Director of the International Institute for Mesopotamian Area Studies (IIMAS) and of the Associazione per la Valorizzazione dell’Archeologia e della Storia Antica (AVASA).
From 1973 until her appointment as Emerita (2003), Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati
taught in the Department of Art at California State University, Los Angeles. Since 2003 she has continued her research at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).