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What a 1940s Excavation Cannot Show

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What a 1940s Excavation Cannot Show

The claim the sequence is usually made to support is continuity: an unbroken cult in one place across millennia. The excavation cannot establish that, and saying so is not a criticism of the excavators, who worked to the standards of their time and produced a result that has held up.

Continuity requires knowing the intervals. A stack of buildings on one spot is consistent with uninterrupted use, and equally consistent with a place remembered, abandoned and returned to more than once. Distinguishing the two needs stratigraphic recording finer than the period allowed and an independent dating series running through the sequence. There is no published radiocarbon series for it, and the site has not been re-excavated with modern methods.

The investigation is therefore recorded as open. What would resolve it is definable rather than vague: renewed excavation of the sequence with modern stratigraphic recording, a radiocarbon programme sampling through the superimposed levels, and analysis of the material between the buildings for signs of weathering or abandonment.

The atlas records what was found, what it is regularly taken to show, and the gap between the two. Nothing about the finding is doubtful; what is uncertain is the inference drawn from it, and that distinction is the one a reader most needs when meeting Eridu cited as the oldest continuously worshipped place in the world.

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