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Introduction
Owing to unusual circumstances in Iraq in the early 1990s the building of a dam across the Greater Zab River in the vicinity of a small village called Bekhme was stopped and the project abandoned. With this termination, the archaeology of this part of the Greater Zab River, called the Sapna Valley, was given a reprieve. Known sites of archaeological interest were spared, including Zawi Chemi Shanidar, an open village site dating back to the 1 1th millennium B.P. and the 4-5th century A.D. respectively (Solecki, Rose, 1980), at least three monasteries and one synagogue site. Shanidar Cave, an important Stone Age site with a long prehistory, lies above the planned reservoir level. But access to it would not be easy. No systematic archaeological survey of the total area had been made beyond cursory investigations made by the author in the early 1950's and later (Solecki, Ralph, 1971, 1952). The author was prompted to write this paper when he found a tourist map of the 1980s showing the Bekhme dam and reservoir already in existence, an error compounded in Gavin Young's (1980) book, in his map of northern Iraq.
The author spent in total about 14 months during 1951, 1953, 1956-7, 1960, 1978 and 1993 in Kurdistan Iraq and the Sapna Valley area of die Greater Zab River basin (Fig. 1). Since events in this region were rarely static, a description of the situation in any single year could not hold for long. Therefore we are compelled to narrate our descriptions chronologically.
One of the low points in our own era was in 1975, when there was an evacuation of the valley and the inhabitants deported under threat that the dam was being built. As for the cultural situation, to make a comprehensive assessment, there ought to be a study of extant government records as well as the records of local religious organizations. Reverend Wigram (the Kurds called him "Rabi") appears to have been the only observer to leave a record of his travels up the Sapna valley from Amadia to Rowanduz and Persia (Wigram, W.A. and Edgar T.A.Wigram, 1914). His later work (1929) gives us many first-hand observations made over his decade of residence in Amadia, in the heartland of the valley....