The Forgotten Workers of Kish: Iraqi Archaeological Labour in Early 20 Th -Century Hillah

In this article I explore the experience of excavation for Iraqi archaeological workers in the first decades of the twentieth century, using the site of Kish as a case study. I draw upon published and archival sources from the brief French-funded work at Kish in 1912 and the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition of 1923–33, situating them within an increasingly rich historiography of late Ottoman and Mandate Iraq. A key aim is simply to identify and acknowledge the central contribution of Iraqi labour to Assyriology and archaeology. But I also hope to contribute methodologically to the history of these disciplines in four interrelated ways. I foreground the structural violence embedded in labour relations between Western expedition leaders and Iraqi workers in colonial contexts, and their long-term repercussions. In particular, I reveal how archaeological labourers became the subjects of racialised anthropometric study over many decades. I also highlight the blurry boundaries between licit and illicit archaeological activities perpetrated historically by both and international actors. Finally, I reconstruct the vast local support network on which large-scale foreign led excavations depended: site guards, inspectors, facilitators and administrators as well as excavators, including many hundreds of child labourers.