The dataset consists of selected results of the UnderTheSands project focusing on the tests area located 70 km south of Baghdad, between Hillah and Al Diwaniya in Iraq.

UnderTheSands is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship funded under the Horizon Europe programme of the European Union (HORIZON-MSCA-2021-PF-01-101062705) at the Landscape Archaeology Research Group (GIAP) of the Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC). The project aimed to locate and reconstruct the irrigation network of the areas under study in the Near East and explore their chronological dynamics, and create a workflow for large scale irrigation mapping.

The test area, Central Floodplain of Euphrates, covers the proximity of ancient Babylon and Kish. It has hot desert climate (BWh) with an avarage precipitation around 148.3 mm. It is highly transformed by ancient and modern irrigation practices (Adams 1981).

The dataset represents updated partial results, which were already published in Remote Sensing journal (Buławka and Orengo 2024). It consists of network of levees and river beds stored in GeoPackage and Shapefile formats, metadata, QGIS project and styles. The vector data have been classified according to the type and their width. Current version of the dataset does not have information about the chronology of the features.

QGIS, 3.38.3

Google Earth Engine, 2022-2024