Archaeologist whose excavations in Syria revolutionised theories of urban living
Joan Oates, who has died aged 94, was an archaeologist specialising in the ancient Near East and a leading expert on Mesopotamian prehistory; she worked on and directed digs in Iraq and Syria that broadened our understanding of ancient cultures.
Her most important work was carried out at Tell Brak, a vast, human-made mound in northeast Syria, where she and her husband David Oates began digging in 1976. During their early excavations Joan was occupied bringing up three children and was mainly involved in drawing potsherds – ‘‘the boring stuff’’ as she put it. But she was co-director with him of the excavations from 1988 then sole director after his death in 2004.
Her expertise in identifying and dating potsherds proved crucial, however, in 1981 when her husband began to dig a fortification from the second millennium BC at the northeast end of the site. In one corner of the excavation, Joan spotted pieces of pottery dating back to the fourth millennium BC. It took years of work to dig through the centuries, but eventually evidence of urban settlement was found which revolutionised theories about early civilisation.
For many years the conventional wisdom held that urban living began in the late 4th century BC in the ‘‘cradle of civilisation’’ once known as Sumer, located in the low-lying alluvial plain of southern Iraq. One of the most dramatic finds at Tell Brak was a building with massive red-brick walls and ovens which Oates and her colleagues dated to about 3800BC. By contrast, very few large structures have been found from a time before 3500 BC in southern Iraq.
Scattered across the building’s floor were objects ranging from spindle whorls, flint and obsidian blades to stones for making beads – jasper, marble, serpentine, diorite, as well as mother-of pearl inlays cut to be used in jewellery – proof that Brak had been a place of wealth and sophistication in the early stages of human civilisation.
Further excavations provided evidence that between 3900 and 3400BC Brak covered 129 hectares, with an estimated 20,000 people living within the city limits, and thousands more in dozens of smaller settlements within a 10-mile radius. Brak, they concluded, probably developed independently as an urban centre earlier than cities of southern Mesopotamia such as Babylon and Uruk, reaching its peak at about the time the betterknown cities were taking form.
Beginning in 2006, the most startling find was a series of mass graves containing mostly disarticulated human bones belonging to individuals aged between 20 and 45, surrounded by debris datable to c3900-3600BC.
‘‘Agatha would often sit . . . knitting, not saying a word . . . Then lo and behold,
our conversations would appear in her next novel.’’ Joan Oates, on her friendship with the crime writer Agatha Christie
Evidence suggested that the graves were the result of organised conflict, though the scale of the settlement at the time suggested an external attack was unlikely. The conflict, Joan Oates suggested, might have been the result of internal social stresses associated with urbanisation.
She was born Joan Louise Lines in Watertown, New York, the daughter of Harold and Beatrice Lines. After taking a degree at Syracuse University, New York, she went on a Fulbright Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, where she took a PhD in 1953.
In the early 1950s Joan worked under the archaeologist Max Mallowan at Nimrud, Iraq, keeping records and cleaning ivories. Mallowan was, famously, the second husband of the ‘‘Queen of Crime’’ Agatha Christie, who took the young Joan under her wing. ‘‘She was a very shy woman [who] never, ever talked about her books,’’ Joan recalled. ‘‘Agatha would often sit in a corner knitting, not saying a word, while we all nattered away. Then lo and behold, our conversations would appear in her next novel, recorded practically word for word!’’
The two women investigated the local souks together, and on days off Joan would accompany the Mallowans on picnics as they explored the region.
It was also at Nimrud that Joan met David Oates. . As was usual at the time she gave up her job to support her husband, following him to excavations in Iraq, where he was director of the British School of Archaeology from 1965 to 1969.
It was a turbulent time in the region and in 1967, as the Oates and their young children were enjoying a roadside picnic outside Baghdad, they were hailed from a British embassy car speeding north and told that war (the Six Day War) had broken out and all British and US nationals had been ordered to leave the country.
They rushed back to the capital, where David Oates received tacit offers of protection from the Iraqi cultural authorities and Joan was visited by neighbours bearing strawberries, a fruit seen as a sign of peace. They remained in Baghdad throughout the crisis.
Then a year later came the Ba’ath coup of Saddam Hussein when, as Joan recalled, ‘‘heads and bodies were displayed in the square near our home, and we had to make detours so the children wouldn’t see them’’. The next year they returned to Britain, where David had been appointed to a chair at the Institute of Archaeology in London.
Joan held a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1966-67 and, from 1971-1995, was a fellow and tutor at Girton College, Cambridge and a lecturer at the university. From 1995, she was a Senior Research Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge.
Singly, though mainly jointly, Joan Oates and her husband published numerous books and papers. She was a fellow of the British Academy and recipient in 2014 of its John Coles Medal.
As well as her husband, a daughter also predeceased her. She is survived by another daughter and a son. –