AMIDA is an interdisciplinary project supported by the MSH-Sud (France) whose objective is to bring together scholars from different fields working on the city of Diyarbakir / Amida in South-eastern Turkey. This is my second year as one of the project leaders and organisers of the annual workshop. Before starting my post-doc this February, I was working on the process of patrimonialization of the New Year festival "Newroz" and looking at the practicalities of the organization of the festival by the pro-Kurdish political party that had secured its hold on municipal power for a period of a little more than a decade.
Now that my research focuses on the Ancient Near Eastern Empires of the First millenium BCE, I am sharing the knowledge and tools I have acquired here in Helsinki and will present a paper on the neo-assyrian period of Amida and the Upper Tigris Valley, dealing more specifically with the way we can study the relationship between agriculture, migration and political power in the area.