Growing through the Dust: Skills, Challenges, and Community in the Mosul Dam Reservoir
Anna Taibi, 2025 Strange/Midkiff Families Fellowship Recipient
The season that just concluded has definitely been one of the most intense of my (still short) fieldwork experience! In October and November 2025, thanks to 麻豆直播鈥檚 scholarship for fieldwork participation, I took part in ReLand鈥檚 2025 campaign in the Mosul Dam Reservoir, KRI. The project鈥檚 goal is twofold: monitoring threatened sites located on Mosul Lake鈥檚 shore and, during cyclical phases of re-emergence, conducting emergency excavations to document settlements and their interaction with the surrounding landscape.
This year, due to an exceptional drought, hundreds of sites have emerged from the lake鈥檚 water, and, sadly, as a remote survey had already highlighted, these millennia-old features have immediately been targeted by looters. As a project member, during the first three weeks of the campaign, I helped record evidence of this kind of damage during the field survey, documenting different types of looting traces.
Previous skills have helped me through this international campaign: I鈥檓 getting better, but I still haven鈥檛 learnt Arabic nor Kurdish very well, so never has my Deutsches Sprachdiplom der Kultursministerkonferenz (DSD) been so helpful as to interact with Tarek, our chief worker from Syria, who spent 20 years excavating with German teams in Western Asia. His long field experience and knowledge had been one of the precious elements of the excavation campaign: although we worked in two different areas, we always kept up with each other鈥檚 work, and I鈥檝e taken his generous advice to heart. This experience has definitely allowed me to work closely with Kurdish team members, fostering mutual learning and shared expertise while contributing to more inclusive and sustainable heritage practices.
In the afternoons, I took care of the small finds documentation, getting the chance to measure, photograph, and document different types of artefacts, architectural elements, and ornaments that humans have produced in the Duhok region through millennia.
Last but not least, during my last week in KRI, I helped organise a tour of the excavation for Gombass鈥� elementary school pupils and students from the University of Duhok. It has been a precious moment to raise awareness among local populations about the cultural and historical significance of their landscape, and for my education as an archaeologist who wants to put ethical and post-colonial theories in practice: I believe that our work means nothing if not immediately given back to the people this heritagescape directly belongs to. This outreach experience has been particularly meaningful for me, as I have a strong interest in community organization, equitable governance, and cultural heritage preservation. After all, it is one of the main objectives of this project to preserve the memory of those communities that lived along the riverbanks, and the millennia-old settlements they inhabited, ensuring that their histories are acknowledged and valued.
Last but not least, during my last week in KRI, I helped organise a tour of the excavation for Gombass鈥� elementary school pupils and students from the University of Duhok. It has been a precious moment to raise awareness among local populations about the cultural and historical significance of their landscape, and for my education as an archaeologist who wants to put ethical and post-colonial theories in practice: I believe that our work means nothing if not immediately given back to the people this heritagescape directly belongs to. This outreach experience has been particularly meaningful for me, as I have a strong interest in community organization, equitable governance, and cultural heritage preservation. After all, it is one of the main objectives of this project to preserve the memory of those communities that lived along the riverbanks, and the millennia-old settlements they inhabited, ensuring that their histories are acknowledged and valued.
I feel that participating in this long campaign of ReLand鈥檚 project has had a significant impact on my development as an archaeologist and as a future researcher. From survey skills to new and exciting responsibilities as a field supervisor, up until the possibility of developing and practicing non-colonial approaches to field archaeology, this campaign has given me far beyond the expertise luggage I expected to get back home with. I鈥檓 grateful for having built new tools and learnt methodologies, and I can鈥檛 wait for upcoming chances of professional and personal growth.
