The excavation house located in the very centre of the ancient city of Uruk has been accommodating excavators and their guests ever since 1928. The building has been extended several times. Its equipment is simple though functional, comprising private accommodation rooms, several offices, work yards, a historic field photo laboratory, and sitting rooms.

Throughout the field project's early days, the site was very much isolated from the next villages. Research and work efficiency could be improved only through the creation of both living quarters and work spaces at the excavation site itself. Whilst in the first regular excavation campaign of 1912/13 these consisted of tents for the excavators and makeshift reed huts for the workmen positioned in a secluded enclosure on the site nearby the ruins of the Sinkashid palace, the excavation director Julius Jordan decided already then to build a more enduring camp after the end of WWI (1928/29). The camp was thus initially established of so-called, portable and easily deployable Doecker barracks. Gradually, however, the director Arnold Nöldeke had the first brick quarters built on top of the archaeological deposits in the immediate vicinity of the city's ancient Eanna sanctuary. Disposed around a large courtyard whose paved paths connected its four sides and thus assuring for safe passage even during mud-covered, moist episodes, the house comprised rooms for sleeping, working, storage, and technical purposes. In the 1970s Jürgen Schmidt arranged for the excavation house to be extended by two extra courtyards to provide for additional accommodation and work space.
Both the basic structures and the furnishings of the excavation house have nonetheless retained much of their original character since the 1930s. They are perfectly adapted to local conditions and easy to maintain with traditional means. As the house is located in the centre of the excavation site, for reasons of conservation all substantial interference with its subsoil has been avoided, thus excluding all installation of modern infrastructures.
Owing to the building's remarkable preservation and the historical quality of its equipment, the excavation house is now in its own right regarded as a historical building.