Ricerc@Sapienza

The Paikuli Project started in 2006, after the 2nd Gulf war, under the direction of the applicant. At the time, the Project was run by IsIAO on the behalf of Task Force Iraq (MAECI), later, in 2011, it came to be hosted by Sapienza, at the Department of Scienze dell'Antichità ; in 2018 it won its first grant in the framework of the program "Grandi scavi d'ateneo". Since the very beginning, all the activities implemented in the Kurdish region of Iraq included both a scientific core - the study of the archaeology
and epigraphy of the region - and a capacity building component, aiming at fostering best practices in the institutions dealing with cultural heritage, including management, promotion, conservation, etc.
Activities included in the present proposal focus on the site of Paikuli, a ceremonial area centering on a tower
built by the Sasanian king Narseh (293-302 CE) that carries a long and historically important bilingual inscription celebrating the king's victory in the dynastic war against Wahram III. The first season of excavation, carried out in 2006, was accompanied and followed by several documentation campaigns, both on-site and at the Museum of Sulaimaniyah, according to security conditions of the area. In 2012, in order to create an archaeological map of the area, the project started an intensive survey of the entire valley where the Paikuli complex lays.
In the 2018 spring campaign the topographic documentation of the site and its environs was started and carried out to a significant extent in order to prepare the ground for a more in depth understanding of the site, through detailed on the ground archaeological surveys and stratigraphic excavations. In the 2018 winter campaign the main focus was on the documentation of the blocks laying about on the Paikuli hill, on topographic survey and on beginning to clean selected areas to prepare the site for the later excavation. The ongoing 2019 spring campaign has seen the start of stratigraphic excavation.