THE CITY AND LANDSCAPE OF UR: AN AERIAL, SATELLITE, AND GROUND REASSESSMENT By EMILY HAMMER New fieldwork at Ur has begun to investigate urban scale, cityorganization, and the environment of the city’ s hinterland. Analysis of new sources of declassified aerial and satellite imagery from the 1950s and 1960s, recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photos, and a systematic surface collection show that Ur may have expanded to between 120–500 hectares in size during its later periods of habitation, far larger than the sixty hectare maximum size previously estimated. Traces of buried architecture visible in the UAV photos and topographic models generated from UAV photos allow for the generation of hypotheses about the city plan of Ur during the Late Larsa/Old Babylonian and Neo Babylonian periods. Relict watercourses mapped in the vicinity of the main mound indicate how the city might have been supplied with water in some periods. Alongside this site-based work, historical aerial and satellite imagery provide an updated picture of ancient hydrology, environment, and settlement patterns around Ur. Introduction In April 2017, new fieldwork at Ur investigated urban scale, city organization, and the environment of the city’ s hinterland. Thanks to Woolley’ s excavations in the 1920s and 1930s, Ur is still today one of the best-known cities in Mesopotamia. However, the site and its surrounding region were passed over entirely by important methodological and interpretive advances in landscape and survey archaeology. Woolley’ s investigations were long in the past by the time intensive surface collections were undertaken at other important sites in the southern alluvial plain, such as Kish, Uruk, Lagash, and Mashkan-shapir. Henry Wright’ s survey of the Ur-Eridu basin provided some regional context for the site, but he did not undertake systematic work at Ur. Now that excavation has returned to Ur, it is time to leverage various types of data to better address the demographic and structural history of urbanism at the site. An analysis of new sources of declassified aerial and satellite imagery from the 1950s and 1960s, recent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photos, and a systematic surface collection show that Ur may have expanded to between 120–500 hectares in size during its later periods of inhabitation, far larger than the sixty hectare maximum size estimated by Wright. Traces of buried architecture visible in the UAV photos and topographic models generated from UAV photos allow for the generation of hypotheses about the city plan of Ur during the Late Larsa/Old Babylonian and Neo Babylonian periods. Relict watercourses mapped in the vicinity of the main mound indicate how the city might have been supplied with water in some periods. Alongside this site-based work, historical aerial and satellite imagery provide anupdated picture of ancient hydrology, environment, and settlement patterns around Ur, revealing a number of previously unmapped sites and watercourses of unknown periods. Part 1 of this article addresses urban scale at Ur, and Part 2 addresses the regional landscape within the Ur-Eridu basin. Part 1: The City of Ur Earlier research at Ur (Tell al-Muqayyar) and in the Ur-Eridu basin was extensive yet still leaves significant questions about environment and urban scale that must be addressed via landscape archaeology. The main sources of published field data concerning Ur’ s urban layout and the surrounding ancient settlement pattern are the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth century excavations of a series of archaeologists affiliated with the British Museum, most significantly those of Sir Leonard Woolley (1922–1934) (Woolley 1934, 1939, 1955, 1962, 1965, 1974; Woolley and Mallowan 1976; for a full summary of all excavations at Ur, see Zettler and Hafford 2015), and the regional survey of the Ur-Eridu basin carried out by Henry Wright in 1966 (Wright 1981). IRAQ (2019) 81 173–206 Doi:10.1017/irq.2019.7 173 Iraq LXXXI (2019) © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2019