Lagash Archaeological Project

Lagash (now Tell al Hiba) was the largest of the three cities that made up the city state of Lagash in ancient Sumer. While the date and character of the earliest settlement is still unknown, by the time of the Dynastic Period (around 2900 BCE) it was a large city with distinct walled neighborhoods: a center of industry and agricultural wealth.

Penn Museum scholars began work in Lagash in 1990 and returned to launch the Lagash Archaeological Project in 2018. The Project uses remote-sensing technology to identify the production zones, waterways, houses, streets, and public eateries of this vast ancient city. Recent discoveries, such as a five-thousand-year-old tavern, have been critical to our developing understanding of the emergence of the urban middle class and the complex economic fabric of the world’s earliest cities.

Archaeological exploration at Tell al-Hiba dates back to the late nineteenth century when a German expedition excavated three separate areas around the highest part of the site. In 1968, a joint project of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, led by Donald P. Hansen greatly expanded our knowledge of the site exposing two temple complexes (the Ibgal of Inana and the Bagara of Ningirsu), an ED III administrative complex, and extensive ED I temple remains. The Penn Museum contributed financially to those excavations and in return received lithics and ceramics for the collection. In 1990, the Penn Museum sponsored the participation of Prof. Holly Pittman in the last season of the NYU-Met excavations. Following the death of Professor Hansen in 2007, Dr. Pittman directed a project to produce the final reports of these excavations.

With the completion of the publication of the legacy excavations, Prof. Pittman requested and received a five-year permit (2019-2024) from the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) to initiate a third campaign of work at the site. For the initial season, the Penn Museum engaged Dr. Zaid Alrawi as the project manager and Pittman invited Prof. Augusta McMahon of the University of Cambridge as field director, and the Penn Museum. The team worked for a one month in March 2019 with the general aim of complementing Hansen’s focus on monumental and elite institutions with investigation into the relationship between the complex ecological setting and the development of an enormous population center during the era of the rise of the world’s first cities, focusing specifically on the pivotal third millennium BCE. Effort was primarily dedicated to remote sensing, using drone UAV photography to record visible features on the surface of the mound, radio magnetic gradiometry to detect features beneath the surface, geological coring to assess the ancient patterns of hydrology, and limited excavations to explore potential areas of craft production were opened in Area H.

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed returning to the field in 2020, but the hiatus allowed the team to refine the research remit as a field- and lab-based project to examine craft production in households and workshops across neighborhoods throughout the ancient city. In October 2021 a small team returned for three weeks to extract further geological cores, to complete drone photography necessary for an accurate topographic map. In March and early April 2022, a full team returned to Lagash. The collaboration with the University of Cambridge was expanded to include the University of Pisa, with Prof. Sara Pizzimenti sharing the role of field director. Three additional trenches were opened in Area H which greatly expanded our grasp of both the mechanics of ceramic production, and its integration into the areas of habitation. We continued our remote sensing work through drone photography; drilled a 25 meter deep core that records the complex and constantly changing history of water and land, and initiated a new systematic surface survey that was able to cover 60 percent of the site. Through heat maps generated off the survey data, we can now confidently identify areas of pyrotechnic craft production (through the presence of slags), lapidary industry, shell industry, as well as the probable location of a cemetery.