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Looter trench at Tell Hamoukar changed my whole approach to field work
I was digging at Tell Hamoukar in Syria back in 2008 when a team accidentally walked into a fresh looter trench that cut straight through a 4000 year old kiln. It was 6 feet deep and they had a backhoe. That moment split me between two camps: do we spend time documenting every looter hole or just focus on untouched areas we can save? The site lost maybe 30 percent of its urban center to those holes. Anyone else torn between salvage work and ignoring the damage to push forward on new discoveries?
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kimr747d ago
Picking one approach over the other is a false choice in a lot of ways. At Hamoukar, we ended up doing both but it was a nightmare to schedule. We'd spend the morning recording every backhoe scar and pot sherd in a looter pit, then switch gears after lunch to map undisturbed architecture. The real killer was that the looters already took the obvious stuff - whole pots, figurines, anything that looked valuable. But they left behind the kiln fragments and ash layers, which is where the real data lives for understanding industrial production. So you end up spending twice the time in a destroyed area just to extract what they didn't care about, while the unlooted sections keep shrinking.
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kim.jake7d ago
Did you ever find anything in those ash layers that changed your whole understanding of the site?
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