Settlement Development in the North Jazira, Iraq
T.J. Wilkinson
D.J. Tucker
Methuen & Co Ltd
The original objective of the North Jazira Survey was to unravel the complex sequence of settlement, land use and communications that evolved within a modest-sized enclave of land contained between the Syrian border to the west, the Jabal Sinjar to the south and the river Tigris to the north and east. We thus hoped to describe the events that led up to, and followed, the growth of towns in Upper Mesopotamia and to relate them to changes in land use and systems of communication. The choice of area was not made solely because of its archaeological potential but partly because the area was designated to be a major irrigation project supplied by waters channelled from the recently completed Saddam Dam. Although, in terms of settlement, the north Jazira plain is not as spectacular as, for example, the Assyrian plains to the east of Mosul or the Tel'afar/Sinjar plain to the south, the area was liberally dotted with archaeological sites which focussed on a single major centre, the massive mound of Tell al-Hawa (Plate I .a), excavated in 1987 and 1988 by Warwick Ball for the British Archaeological Expedition to Iraq (Ball, Tucker and Wilkinson 1989; Ball 1991).
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