Joan Oates, archaeologist whose excavations in Syria revolutionised theories of urban living – obituary

Joan Oates, who has died aged 94, was an archaeologist specialising in the ancient Near East and a leading expert on Mesopotamian prehistory; she worked on and directed digs in Iraq and Syria that broadened our understanding of ancient cultures.

Her most important work was carried out at Tell Brak, a vast, human-made mound in north-east Syria, where she and her husband David Oates began digging in 1976. During their early excavations Joan was occupied bringing up three children and was mainly involved in drawing potsherds — “the boring stuff” as she put it. But she was co-director with him of the excavations from 1988 then sole director after his death in 2004.

Her expertise in identifying and dating potsherds proved crucial, however, in 1981 when her husband began to dig a fortification from the second millennium BC at the north east end of the site. In one corner of the excavation, Joan spotted pieces of pottery dating back to the fourth millennium BC. It took years of work to dig through the centuries but eventually evidence of urban settlement was found which revolutionised theories about early civilisation.

For many years the conventional wisdom held that urban living began in the late 4th century BC in the “cradle of civilization” once known as Sumer, located in the low-lying alluvial plain of southern Iraq. One of the most dramatic discoveries at Tell Brak was a building with massive red-brick walls and ovens which Joan Oates and her colleagues dated to about 3,800 BC. By contrast very few large structures have been found from a time before 3500 BC in southern Iraq.

Scattered across the building’s floor were objects ranging from spindle whorls, flint and obsidian blades to stones, mostly imported, for making beads - jasper, marble, serpentine, diorite, as well as mother-of pearl inlays cut to be used in jewellery – proof that Brak had been a place of wealth and sophistication in the early stages of human civilisation. Elsewhere the archaeologists found traces of a brick platform and a wall built 1,000 years before that.

Further excavations beyond the high mound provided evidence that between 3900 and 3400 BC Brak covered some 320 acres, with an estimated 20,000 people living within the city limits, and thousands more in dozens of smaller settlements within a 10-mile radius. Brak, they concluded, probably developed independently as an urban centre earlier than cities of southern Mesopotamia such as Babylon and Uruk, reaching its peak at about the time the better-known cities were taking form.

Beginning in 2006, the most startling find was a series of mass graves containing mostly disarticulated human bones belonging to individuals between 20 and 45 years of age, surrounded by debris datable to c 3900-3600 BC. Evidence suggested that the graves were the result of organised conflict, though the scale of the settlement at the time suggested that an external attack was unlikely. The conflict, Joan Oates suggested, might have been the result of internal social stresses associated with urbanisation.

She was born Joan Louise Lines in Watertown, New York on May 6 1928, the daughter of Harold and Beatrice Lines. After taking a degree at Syracuse University, New York, she went on a Fulbright Scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, where she took a PhD in 1953.

In the early 1950s Joan worked under the archaeologist Max Mallowan at Nimrud, Iraq, keeping records and cleaning ivories. Mallowan was, famously, the second husband of the “Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie, who took the young Joan under her wing.

“She was a very shy woman [who] never, ever talked about her books,” Joan recalled. “Agatha would often sit in a corner knitting, not saying a word, while we all nattered away. Then lo and behold, our conversations would appear in her next novel, recorded practically word for word!”

The two women investigated the local souks together, and on days off Joan would accompany the Mallowans on picnics as they explored the region.

The one subject which was taboo was the novelist’s mysterious 11-day disappearance in 1926 during her first marriage to Archibald Christie. The famous “missing 11 days”, Joan Oates told the writer’s biographer, Laura Thompson, “was the unspoken subject. It was a real no-no. I was told once… that someone had broached the subject and she wouldn’t speak to that person again.”

It was also at Nimrud that Joan met David Oates. They married in 1956 after Joan had begun her career as an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. As was usual at the time she gave up her job to support her husband, following him to excavations at Tell al-Rimah, in Iraq’s Nineveh province, and to Baghdad where he was director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq from 1965 to 1969. In 1967-68 they led excavations at Choga Mami in eastern Iraq and also undertook excavations at Nippur in southern Iraq.

But it was a turbulent time in the region and Joan would recall a day in 1967, as she and her husband and young children were enjoying a roadside picnic outside Baghdad, when they were hailed from a British embassy car speeding north and told that war (the Six Day War) had broken out and all British and US nationals had been ordered to leave the country.

They rushed back to the capital, where David Oates received tacit offers of protection from the Iraqi cultural authorities and Joan was visited by neighbours bearing strawberries, a fruit seen as a sign of peace. They remained in Baghdad throughout the crisis.

Then a year later came the Ba’ath coup of Saddam Hussein when, as Joan recalled, “heads and bodies were displayed in the square near our home, and we had to make detours so the children wouldn’t see them.” The next year they returned to Britain where David had been appointed to a chair at the Institute of Archaeology in London.

Joan held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966-67 and, from 1971 to 1995, was a fellow and tutor at Girton College, Cambridge and a lecturer at the university. From 1995, she was a Senior Research Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge.

For ten years from 1993 the Oateses made annual pilgrimages to Iraq at the invitation of the Iraqi Government for the Babylon music and theatre festival. Their archaeological reference collections of pottery and other finds, exported with the permission of the Iraqi and Syrian authorities, were presented to the British Museum in return for financial contributions to their fieldwork at Tell Brak.

Singly, though mainly jointly, Joan Oates and her husband published numerous books and papers. She was a fellow of the British Academy and recipient in 2014 of its John Coles Medal.

As well as her husband, a daughter also predeceased her. She is survived by another daughter and a son.

Joan Oates born May 6 1928, died February 3 2023