Here’s a photograph from 2007 that shows the citadel mound in the background. It’s 23 meters (= 70 feet) high and is made entirely of collapsed buildings accumulated over a period of 5,000 years.
In this case, we are excavating in the “lower town”. I thought this might give everyone a sense of the scale of the site. The excavation area is 20 meters by 10 meters (about 60 feet by 30 feet). The raised areas are the mudbrick walls in a small part of a temple treasury that we excavated from 2001 to 2010. The temple (which we have not located yet) was separate from the treasury and was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.
