The Kish Collection

Project Future

The ultimate goal of the Kish Project is to produce, over the next three years, a final site report covering the eleven seasons of excavation. The production of a report synthesizing the entirety of the excavations at Kish will be a complex undertaking, analogous to assembling a giant jig-saw puzzle using the pieces provided by the various databases and records left – but for the large part undigested and uninterpreted – by the excavators.

Setting each artifact, building, and area of excavation in its fullest archaeological context and unraveling the archaeology and history of Kish as it emerges from that process will be a considerable challenge. To this end, a team of more than a dozen specialists in archaeology and related disciplines has been assembled to produce this report. Work will proceed area by area for the site. For each area the responsible staff member will examine the existing record of the work that was done, as it is documented in the few original reports and in the archival record. Using that material plus the work

of other scholars, s/he will reconstruct the stratigraphy of that part of the site, producing drafts of plans and sections as necessary. Then the objects discovered there will be placed in their original archaeological contexts and studied for the information they reveal about a wide range of topics, including date(s) and function(s) of that portion of Kish and changes over both time and space. The whole area and its contents will be studied in the context of other discoveries in Mesopotamia and adjacent regions and compared and contrasted with that material to reveal what broader aspects of Mesopotamian culture it may elucidate.

Continue >>