The Orient Department carries out research using the methods of the various archaeological disciplines and their neighbouring specialities in the countries of Southwest Asia located to the south of Türkiye and to the west of Iran, including the Arabian Peninsula and the northern part of the Horn of Africa. It fosters scholarly diversity and multidisciplinary as well as international cooperation and development of integrated research approaches.
It thus contributes to the protection, preservation, and communication of cultural heritage, particularly in regions threatened by political conflict, modern land use, or natural disasters. To this end, it relies on its longstanding experience of research whilst further developing methods for cultural preservation.
The region the department works in is characterised by a natural and cultural diversity which has led to various social and technological innovations. Next to once densely populated areas favoured by the abundance of water (along rivers, in rain-fed agricultural zones and in oases), in which settlements without relocating managed to thrive over centuries, if not millennia, there were also vast regions that, not least owing to their aridity, remained thinly populated and often only sporadically used by predominantly nomadic groups. Hosts of sites in the Levant, Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula with extensively preserved monuments offer detailed insight into processes of genesis, change, and of the making of culture in the respective societies. The Orient Department addresses the diversity of these highly different regions in a multidisciplinary strategy of research.
The region's distinctive environmental and historical prerogatives allow the study of human history's fundamentals before the backdrop of tensions between sedentary and mobile forms of sustenance. These include the organisation of human coexistence and ways of securing subsistence in arid and semi-arid regions, which in terms of archaeology as compared to any other region in the world can hardly be investigated as clearly as here. The projects conducted by the Orient Department are specifically concerned with many of these essential and all-embracing issues. These are hence the subject of fundamental research, which for many areas of the study region yet calls for urgent implementation.
From an archaeological and historical stand, the regional and inter-regional interdependencies of this vast territory of interest offer great potential for pursuing strands of fundamental relevance for archaeology worldwide. Central issues that currently are being studied pertain to economy, religion, and politics, and in particular to (1) environmental adaptation, (2) mobility, (3) geographic phenomena of settlement, and (4) aspects of resource usage of in both regional and global assessment. Questions relating to (5) culture preservation and of its conceptual development often form integral part of the research programmes and are addressed in close cooperation with local partners.
Researchers from all career stages are engaged in projects conducted by the Orient Department. As a rule, only project managers and employees in charge of the service duties are part of the department's permanent staff, though who are assisted by research assistants enrolled in both academic and organisational training programmes. Through third-party funding, special programmes, and cooperation schemes additional staff is appointed within almost all research projects . The aim is to achieve a balanced ratio between male and female junior researchers and among experienced, specialised staff so as to ensure a self-reliant implementation of the different projects in the host countries.
After fulfilment of the field projects, the Orient Department consistently endorses both evaluation work, whose execution often occurs within the frameworks of university qualifications, and the publication of research findings. In order to warrant for the long-term preservation and processing of the research data and their effective management, the projects make use of a variety of IT components which the DAI has developed over the years.
People & Environment
The research carried out by the Orient Department is closely coupled to the spatial and climatic conditions of the ancient cultures in West Asia. The region's climate is considered as basically arid, but there are only few regions in the world where abundant precipitation and dry desert climates are located so closely together. The relationships between humans and the environment is therefore at the heart of the Orient Department's work: So how does climate influence people and societies? And do humans influence climate through innovative techniques and methods in agriculture or through changes induced by cultivating new plants or by raising certain animals?
Water at all times has been a precious resource in numerous of Western Asia's regions. Innovations in hydraulic engineering and moreover novel applications of agriculture are probed variously in the projects of the department and its branch offices. Topics like the exchange of agricultural techniques connected to water management, or experiments in the cultivation of certain plants or raising of animals are sometimes traceable over long distances and extended periods, and thus set at the heart of sundry of the department's research projects. Since 2020, these issues have come increasingly under investigation in Orient Department projects in the framework of the German Federal Foreign Office's so-called GroundCheck programme.
Archaeological investigations at the interface between man and his environment would be inconceivable without international or interdisciplinary research networks. Through its multifaceted projects carried out in countries like Ethiopia, the Emirate of Fujairah, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Syria, the Orient Department cross-links a wide variety of natural and economic environments as well as different social models reaching from the Neolithic to late antiquity and Islamic times (from about 10,000 BC to the 19th century).
Mobility
Die Bewegungen von Personen, Waren und Ideen sowie von Wissen und Innovation sind seit der frühen Menschheitsgeschichte Motor und Triebkraft gesellschaftlicher Veränderungen. Ohne Mobilität sind manche Entwicklungen und ihre Verbreitung, beispielsweise die Verhüttung von Erzen zur Herstellung von Werkzeugen und Waffen aus Metall, undenkbar. Für die Verbreitung von Innovationen ist jedoch nicht nur großräumige Mobilität wichtig, sondern ganz besonders auch die Mobilität in kleinen Bereichen. Der Nachweis und die Untersuchung von Gemeinschaften, deren Wirtschaftsweise die meist saisonale Viehwanderweidewirtschaft einschließt, ist nur ein Beispiel von vielen Arbeitsschwerpunkten in diesem Bereich.
New research methods on human mobility to a large extent integrate direct evidence obtained from scientific probing methods (including strontium and sulphur isotope analyses), by which migration movements and social phenomena linked to either mobility or sedentism are better understood.
Almost all projects of the Orient Department investigate cultural interactions with neighbouring regions in multi-disciplinary cooperation. Whereas the projects in Ethiopia, for instance, chiefly concentrate on Yemen and its African contexts, those concerning the Arabian Peninsula are more attentive to the surroundings in the neighbouring areas of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia, whereas the projects in Iraq focus on networks reaching further east but yet also in the Arabian Peninsula.
Phenomena Of Settlement Geography
The landscape impacts our life in space both now and in the past. Watercourses for instance may act at the same time as obstacles and as connecting routes between distant regions. Human relationships to landscapes are sundry and may shape entire landscapes to a considerable extent. Landscape archaeology develops and applies methods for re-establishing the readability of ancient settlement landscapes. Several projects supervised by the Orient Department focus on settlement geography. The topographical environment around ancient settlements, their road and water networks, are just some of the aspects currently investigated.
The department's projects interweave with its other research subjects. Environmental adaptations become especially palpable through the observation of phenomena connected to settlement geography. Such is for instance the case with large cities in Southern Mesopotamia like Uruk 5,000 years ago, but also with ones like al-Hira in the early Christian era, in which well-contrived water management and effective urban structures were directly related.
The landscapes of Western Asia offer hosts of possibilities regarding research and comparative studies: The overall geographical area is marked by its great diversity, and it brings together the most different conditions ranging from the overabundance of water to the driest of deserts, and from virtually unsurmountable mountains to the widest and flattest plains. The Orient Department is represented with projects in almost all of the region's geographical zones, and it contributes significantly to research of urban areas, irrigation technologies, and religious landscapes, among other things.
Aspects Of Resource Usage
Like today the access to both local and foreign resources in prehistoric and ancient societies were subject to rules established through complex networks of relationships. Such networks materialise trough the study of the distribution and processing of raw materials and of their origins. Scientific analysis methods play an important role here. They allow for instance to determine the properties and possible origins of certain materials. Moreover, they may serve in the identification of the technological manufacturing characteristics of the latter.
Next to products negotiated in long-distance trade such as aromatics (frankincense, myrrh), metal, semi-precious stones, obsidian, animals and animal products, also building and work materials like stone, wood, brick, clay, ceramics, glass, and faience were key commodities. Physical investigations into materials as part of the object's history are part of virtually all projects of the Orient Department. Depending on the contexts, some projects may also make use of more extensive raw material analyses.
Another interesting field is the investigation of the way in which control over the access and distribution of raw materials was interconnected with social occurrences. For this matter, were tiered systems able evolve beyond exclusive networks demarcated by advanced expertise (as in metallurgy)? And what were the dynamics of surging conflicts related to resources?
Issues like these are much reminiscent of similar phenomena occurring in our own contemporary and globalised world. Exclusive access to raw materials, for example in the semiconductor sector or marked volatility resulting from climate change, more than ever highlight the effects from resource scarcity on modern societies and different political systems. Contemporary narratives benefit from their overview over past historical settings and thence also from the research activities by the Orient Department.
Cultural Preservation
Sustainable and forward-looking action in all areas of research is of high importance to the Orient Department. This in particular includes the active commitment to cultural property preservation and protection (--> Link zu Kulturerhalttext OA). Projects led by the department and its branch offices have thus been investing into dedicated training courses, for example for craftsmen and young archaeologists stationed in host countries.
Projects aimed at historical stonemasonry techniques, clay or plaster processing techniques (--> Link: Gadara, Lehmlink Uruk??), structural consolidation of historical buildings, material properties and their functional determination at all times go hand-in-hand with archaeological and scientific ventures. The intention is not only the protection and preservation of cultural heritage and ancient buildings and sites, but moreover the implementation of sustainable and local safeguarding of more recent historical buildings. Significant cornerstones in this respect is the local creation of jobs in line with the interests of local communities, the inclusion of local narratives, and the development of modular knowledge components.
Research data management (RDM)
The research projects of the Orient Department generate vast amounts of research data that require systematic management, safeguarding and preservation, and also accessibility. The DAI for this purpose is actively developing archaeology-specific IT solutions which are also accessible publicly via the iDAI.world. A separate work area for archives and RDM has been set up at the Orient Department, by which the analogue and digital data generated by the department's projects are managed centrally.
Excavation records and routine traces generated by the research and the activities of archaeologists and scientists at the department may soon themselves transform into testimonies of unfolding events and end up as unique and latest evidence of irretrievable times and realities.
Hence the importance of processing and digitising the departmental archive holdings. This is coupled with the responsibility of recording not only research data but beyond that also the archaeological work within the overall local contexts. The department's holdings are therefore progressively being digitised and made visible as well as processed in dedicated projects (→ about the archive).
An important part of the RDM are the Orient Department's publications which are supervised by its own editorial staff (→ about the editorial office).