Dr. Petra Creamer, an Assyriologist, archaeologist, and professor of the Ancient Near East at Emory University, joins Lexie to discuss focusing on the Assyrian Empire to understand how non-elites experienced state power, Assyrian deportation as a labor and control strategy that often moved families and aimed to resettle people as productive “Assyrians,” and conducting fieldwork at Katrash near Erbil, an unexpected rural Neo-Assyrian administrative/storage center likely tied to agricultural extraction and imperial bureaucracy.