By Adiel Kaplan
Elizabeth Stone is a professor of archaeology at Stony Brook University, specializing in the study of how ancient Mesopotamian societies functioned. She has been on many archaeological digs in the region, frequently researching alongside her historian husband, Paul Zimansky. They study the “cradle of civilization,” the oldest documented societies on Earth, many of which were in what is modern-day Iraq. But, for large segments of Stone and Zimansky’s careers, digging in Iraq was near impossible due to politics, wars and sanctions.
I wanted to know what archaeology in Iraq was like during the years Stone was able to dig there. She told me about the 1990s when, in the lull between the 1991 and 2003 U.S. invasions, she discovered the lost city of Mashkan-shapir.
AK: So, up until this point, most of your research was not in Iraq?
Elizabeth Stone: Right. Well, you couldn’t, I mean, Iraq was a mess. Then the U.S. invaded Iraq [in 1991], and one of the things they [the U.S. government] did is they established Fulbright grants. So, I got a Fulbright grant to go to Iraq.
…I just kind of dreamt up some museum project. Basically, I wanted to be there.
AK: Why?
ES: Well, I really wanted to dig there. But in order to – I knew that in order to get a permit, I had to be hanging around a lot. People had to know me. You can’t just kind of write and say, ‘Well, here I am, I’m kind of Joe Blow, I want a permit.’
And I wasn’t – I hadn’t spent enough time there. And, so, I actually worked on somebody else’s project in the [Iraq National] Museum, just so I was in the museum everyday. They were doing salvage at the time, because there were various sites [where] they were doing irrigation projects and [excavating] things that were going to be damaged… And they actually would pay for the excavations, and so there was a lot of that going on.
But I was interested in Mesopotamian cities and I really wanted to do a project where we could look at a single-period, urban site… where we could get an understanding of how it was all put together.
My dissertation advisor Robert Adams and some of his students had done archaeological surveys, so we had basic data on most of the sites in Iraq. “They were so big, occupied during this time period, blah, blah, blah.”
So, I went through all of those data, looking for a large site—because I was interested in cities; occupied for a short period of time—so you would have just, kind of, one thing there; and occupied during the early second millennium—which is when you begin to get the public documents as well as the private documents. And there were two.
Stone’s plan worked. She picked a site—south of Baghdad and east of Babylon, near the ancient shores of the Tigris river—and got permission to dig.
ES: Mashkan-shapir was this fabulous site. It was out in the middle of the desert, but it was relatively easy to get to—well, it wasn’t at that particular point, because we were living at the dig house at Abu Salabikh [another site]. It’s in the middle of the irrigation zone, so you have to kind of get yourself through the irrigation zone, then you can drive fast through the desert.
AK: Is that a headache to get through?
ES: Well, it was especially a headache because we had a Land Rover, which has a slightly wider wheelbase than anything else. So, there are all these little mud bridges across canals, and we would kind of chip off the edges of them and have to go and take another road. And, so, you’re kind of winding your way through irrigation canals and bridges and things…But we did it for three weeks.
It was in the summer—we got blown away by dust storms. But the site was just littered with objects. It was a fabulous site. I can’t remember, we found something like 300—I just remember going for a walk, there was a mound at the south end of the site. I wasn’t sure if it was from the same time period, because it seemed pretty high. It actually turned out to be where the temple was. It was a temple platform. And there were, I don’t know, 40 pieces of terra cotta statury. [Laughs]
AK: Lying on the surface?
ES: On the surface.
We were trying to figure out what the site was. We had written an article, arguing that it was the site known historically – but [that] nobody had ever found – called Mashkan-shapir…One of the things we knew about Mashkan-shapir was that it had a city wall… So, I went for a walk around, looking for the city wall. I kind of found the city wall. I kind of looked around, and then all of a sudden there was a heap of text that said ‘This is Mashkan-shapir.’ [Laughs] I think the second or third piece I picked up, it said Mashkan-shapir.
The idea was that we would do this survey… We flew kites so we had aerial photographs so we could map it.
AK: You would take photographs with a kite? How does that work?
ES: [Laughs] You just walk up and down with a kite. In those days, the camera had a timer in it and we would send it up, it would take a bunch of pictures and we would bring it down and put another roll of film in it.
AK: So, one of the skills of being an archaeologist is being able to fly a kite?
ES: Well, that’s Paul. [Laughs] Both of us flew kites as kids. We knew other people who wanted to do this kind of thing, but nobody knew how to fly a kite, so they broke the camera.
AK: This wasn’t standard archaeology practice?
ES: Well, people do balloons. But those only go straight up.
AK: But you guys were the kite people?
ES: We were kite people. We did a complete aerial survey of Mashkan-shapir with a kite. And I think, in many ways, we ended up understanding the way that city was put together better than any other Mesopotamian city.