Iraqi Kurdistan is spectacularly beautiful in April; the foothills of the Zagros Mountains break out in flowers, the barley shoots up in the valleys and everything is eye-wateringly green. Down by the calm waters of Lake Dokan, I’m trying to explain the mystery and wonder of single context excavation to a very nice man called Halkawt who works for the directorate of antiquities in Erbil. He’s enthusiastic, but his excavation experience is pretty limited so we’re very much starting on page one of practical archaeology.

I’m working on a project run by the British Museum aimed at training Iraqi and Kurdish antiquities staff in modern archaeological practice. It’s bankrolled by the Cultural Protection Fund; a £30 million pot set up by the British government to counter the destruction of cultural heritage in conflict zones, particularly as a response to the actions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The snappily-titled British Museum Iraq Emergency Heritage Management Training Scheme brings small groups of Iraqi archaeologists to London for eight weeks of training at the British Museum, before sending them to one of two excavations set up by the Museum in Iraq for six more weeks of training in the field. The programme ranges from the very basics of archaeology to drone survey and 3D scanning. In total they hope to provide this training to fifty Iraqis over five years.

One of the two field projects set up in Iraq is Qalatga Darband, which roughly translates from Kurdish as ‘castle of the mountain pass’. The site guards a strategic gap in a chain of low mountains where they’re cut by the channel of the Lower Zab river. This is where Halkawt and I are sitting, contemplating a massive dry-stone Parthian city wall dating to the second or third century BC.

The grass-grown walls of Qalatga Darband, running down to Lake Dokan. The fortifications defended the western border of the young Parthian Empire. In the foreground is one of the square towers under excavation. Photograph: Mary Shepperson/by permission of The British Museum

It’s an impressive structure, now mostly buried under earth and grass. It stretches from halfway up the mountainside to the north, across the modern road and the cultivation, down to where Lake Dokan (created by the Dokan Dam in the 1950s) has washed away its southern end, along with a good chunk of the ancient site. Every twenty metres or so the wall is interrupted by a square projecting tower and it’s one of these I’m currently excavating. The tower has grown a new crop of grass on top since I uncovered it last autumn and is now uncomfortably full of spring snakes.

I’m teaching Halkawt how to excavate in secure contexts, separating out each layer and structure and collecting the material separately from each. We’re practicing applying the recording system; giving the right numbers to deposits, samples and finds. We’re covering how to draw plans and calculate levels, how to take a decent photo. If I’m feeling brave at the end of the season we’ll try a Harris matrix. It’s all very basic stuff, but very necessary.

Halkawt Qadr, a Kurdish archaeologist, drawing with a planning frame at the site of Qalatga Darband Photograph: Mary Shepperson/by permission of The British Museum

The Iraqi antiquities service was once one of the best in the Middle East with a proud tradition going back to Hormuzd Rassam, who directed excavations at Nineveh and Nimrud, and at many other sites in the late 1800s. During most of the twentieth century the antiquities service was active and well-funded; Iraq’s ancient past was seen as a source of national pride. This began to change as first the Iran-Iraq war, and then the sanction years which followed the Gulf War, drained Iraqi archaeology of money and international contact. Finally, the 2003 coalition invasion and the chaos which followed left Iraq’s heritage services in a very poor state.



After decades of under-resourcing and isolation, Iraqi archaeologists have been starved of the funding, training and equipment needed to conduct archaeology to modern standards. Ironically, this situation may have been improved by the actions of the Islamic State (Isis). Following the very public destruction of so much cultural heritage, western governments have been queuing up to offer money through initiatives similar to the UK’s Cultural Protection Fund.



But what could the money be used for? Once an archaeological site is looted or bulldozed there’s relatively little that can be done for it except tidy up a bit; to a large extent, the ancient material and the primary data are simply gone. Of course, many of the sites remain inaccessible so immediate action is not possible.

In any case, it’s no longer seen as acceptable for western archaeologists to wade-in to ‘save’ the archaeology of another country, dragging all that cultural imperialist baggage along with them. Instead the goal is to enable the country’s own heritage professionals to do the work themselves.

So, the answer comes in the form of training and support for Iraqi archaeologists, conservators and museum staff. As well as the British Museum’s programme, which is currently the most ambitious of its type, various training schemes have been set up with funding from western governments and from UNESCO. Only last month a new project was announced by the Smithsonian aiming to prepare Iraqi archaeologists to document and stabilise the recently liberated site of Nimrud, supported by $400,000 dollars from the US Department of State. One of the Iraqis who will take part is currently training with us here at Qalatga Darband.

Intentions are good and the direction of travel is positive, but it’s still a long road to fully reviving Iraqi archaeology. It takes years to properly train an archaeologist and there’s a limit to what can be achieved in the short timescale of the British Museum programme. In the long-run it will be down to our Iraqi colleagues to make the most of the support available now. In the future they will have to deal with the legacy left by Isis and previous conflicts, as well as acting as custodians to the heritage of one of the most archaeologically rich countries on earth.

In the meantime, I will be helping Halkawt to label his pottery buckets.