Barda Balka

Barda Balka is one of the most significant Palaeolithic open-air sites in the Middle East, located in northern Iraq near the Little Zab river and the town of Chamchamal in the Kirkuk region. Systematically investigated in the 1940s by Danish and Iraqi archaeologists, the site yielded Middle Palaeolithic stone tools — handaxe types suggesting human occupation roughly 100,000 years ago, making it one of the earliest known traces of human presence in the Mesopotamian sphere. Today the site remains largely undeveloped; visitors encounter an open steppe landscape with faint surface traces of former excavation trenches.