In the summer of 2025 a team from the University of Udine walked the ploughed fields inside the walls of Nimrud, in northern Iraq, in squares forty meters on a side, picking up the pottery lying on the surface of each square and entering the counts into a geodatabase. The top class on the density map they published this year runs to 1,628 fragments from a single square. Darker classes cover most of the middle of the walled area and thin toward its northern edge. The scatter exists because the fields are ploughed, every year, to a depth of about twenty centimeters.
Twenty centimeters is a shallow plough, and it accounts for a good deal about the site. It lifts sherds, brick fragments and the occasional inscribed piece into the plough zone and shifts them a short distance sideways, and it comes nowhere near the tops of buried walls. Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, was never intensively reoccupied after the Assyrian empire fell in 612 BC. The survey recorded material running from the third millennium BC through to the Islamic period, roughly the mid-seventh century AD onward, but nothing later ever settled on the site with the weight of the Assyrian town, so the houses and streets of the ninth to seventh centuries BC sit under farmland rather than under a medieval quarter, which is not the case at Nineveh, where modern Mosul has spread across a substantial part of the ancient city.
The lower town covers 340 hectares inside nearly eight kilometers of fortification wall.
In the 180 years since Austen Henry Layard opened his first trenches there in 1845, three buildings in all of that area have been dug at any scale: Fort Shalmaneser at the south-east corner, the Town Wall Palace, and the palace in the sector known as PD5. Everything Nimrud is famous for came off the acropolis, and it came off in quantity. Max Mallowan’s excavations in the 1950s recovered a stele on which Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC), who made Kalhu his capital in 879 BC, records ten days of feasting for 69,574 people at the city’s inauguration, a figure given to the last digit. There is no comparable number for how many people actually lived in the lower town during any Assyrian decade; the estimates in circulation come from assumed densities multiplied by the walled area rather than from excavated houses. The Nimrud Lower Town Archaeological Project, run by Daniele Morandi Bonacossi and Francesca Simi1 of the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Udine, is an attempt to recover the street plan, the neighborhoods, the workshops and the water supply of an imperial capital using methods that mostly do not involve digging. The question underneath the fieldwork is whether a city of this size can be read from its surface, from sherd counts, a terrain model and the magnetic contrast between buried fill and the soil around it, well enough to say where a trench should go and, past that, well enough to say how the place was organized.
The starting point was photographs taken to look at something else. Declassified imagery from U-2 flights and the CORONA and HEXAGON satellite programs, dated between 1967 and 1974, covers northern Iraq at usable resolution, and its value now lies partly in its age, since it predates most of the land leveling, canal cutting and village expansion of the last fifty years. Jason Ur, an archaeologist at Harvard who works on Mesopotamian settlement, drew on this class of imagery in a 2013 paper on the morphology of Neo-Assyrian cities, and at Nimrud it showed the fortification circuit, the gates, a street system and blocks of denser and sparser occupation inside the walls. But a line on a photograph is only a proposal about a line in the ground. Before the 2025 survey could test any of it, the team needed a modern map, which they built with differential GPS and a drone: new benchmarks, an orthophoto, a digital terrain model, a site plan.
