After a brief blogging hiatus of only six and a half years, I continue. The long silence will remain mysterious because the explanation is long and boring and I can’t be bothered to write about it. It will be left to your imaginings (nothing too weird please).

Having escaped from university-post prison by sneaking off into the field while no one was looking and my boss was on holiday, I find myself this August on a shiny new project in the Kurdish region of Northern Iraq. In fact, I’m back in Erbil, scene of many previous archaeology-related infamies detailed in this blog. Erbil is much the same as when I lived here before (2013-2015), but with a lot more choice of coffee and a lot less Islamic State terrorism. The German Bar remains open and ludicrously expensive.

On the upside, it’s lovely to be away from my desk and back in my natural dirty habitat, but it’s hardly the best time of year for outdoor physical labour (it’s averaging 45°C this week), and the sites we’re investigating are a group of seven thoroughly uninspiring low mounds. The kindly staff from the Erbil directorate of antiquities keep pointing out larger, better sites we could dig instead, but this is done in the sort of hopeless tone of resignation with which my mother tells me to drink less. Foreigners are weird and do strange idiot things. In all honesty, a significant part of me agrees with them; the disgusting part of me which actually pursues archaeology to find palaces, temples and treasure, in exactly the way I’m not supposed to. Anyway, here we are, armed with a series of earnest scientific questions to ask of these underwhelming little pimples, and a certainty that I’ll spend a very hot month finding not very much. Such is archaeological life.

First off, we had to visit our sites, which began well when we found that our first mound is now a hole instead of a hump, and not the good sort of hole. Rather than being dug by highly educated vandals who record the process of their destruction, this hole was dug by a Kurdish farmer who heartlessly wanted to irrigate his crops. The remaining sites at least surpass this low bar. We are now embarked on a week-long dose of surface survey, which experience tells me is enjoyable for up to 0.75 workdays. I am in fact over it by Day 1 second breakfast, after which the temperature tops 40°C and everyone becomes less enthusiastic in their search for diagnostic pottery and more engaged in their own physical survival. In better news, we have got the air conditioning working in our Erbil house and have located nearby kebab and alcohol sources, so at least off-site survival seems assured.