Excavation at Ziyaret Tepe has been concentrated in eleven different areas across the high mound, lower town and adjacent to the site. These Operations are labeled A through K.

Operation A is a broad clearance of a monumental mudbrick building on the eastern side of the high mound. The building dates to the Late Assyrian period. Notable features of this building include an extensive baked brick pavement and a series of metal-working installations from which an extensive collection of copper or copper-alloy vessels and other artifacts have come. This building was constructed on a thick mudbrick platform which seals earlier deposits. Excavations here were undertaken in 2000-2002.

Operations B and C were small 5m by 5m soundings testing the nature of deposits on the high mound in 2000. Operation B revealed a considerable depth of late surfaces and a large bread oven (tannur). Operation C was located on the western slope of the high mound. Here we found the remains of part of a well preserved building of the early 2nd millennium BC.

Operation D was also excavated in 2000. This broad area excavation in the lower town revealed a monumental gate complex in the city wall. Massively thick walls of mudbrick were clearly visible, although erosion had removed all the but the bottom few course of brick.

Operation E on the eastern slope of the high mound is the principal stratigraphic sounding at Ziyaret Tepe. Here we have documented a series a occupation layers spanning the Early Bronze Age, early 2nd millennium BC, Mittani, Middle Assyrian, local Iron Age and Late Assyrian periods. Excavations in Operation E were carried out in 2000-2002 and in 2004.

Operation F was a brief "salvage" operation examining the damage done by robbers using a backhoe in the winter of 2000. Our operations cleaned out an illicit excavation hole to document the damage to the site. The backhoe trench had merely cut through a thick deposit of slope wash of post-Assyrian date.

Operation G is an extensive, on-going excavation in the western part of the lower town. Here two important mudbrick buildings of the Late Assyrian period have been revealed. The Eastern Building has a beautiful mosaic pavement courtyard and contained a variety of storage vessels. The Western Building housed an important archive of cuneiform tablets dating to the very end of the Assyrian Empire, c. 620-610 BC.

Operation H was the brief exploration of a possible graveyard near the Tigris River north of the mound. The graves were post-Assyrian and badly disturbed by modern activities.

Operation I comprised a series of small test pits running along a east-west transect across the northern edge of the high mound excavated in 2001. The purpose of this operation was to identify the nature of the overburden on the high mound and to look for promising areas for future excavation.

Operation J was an investigation at the western edge of the lower town in 2002. Here we had noted a high concentration of Roman roof tiles and sherds on the surface and hoped to recover evidence of a Roman farmstead. The results of our investigations were the recovery of a very late compound with walls partially built from re-used Roman roof tiles.

Operation K was excavated in 2003 and 2004. Guided by our subsurface gradiometry maps, we placed a narrow 3m-wide trench across the city wall at the southern edge of the settlement in order to document the structure of the wall. We discovered the city wall to be 6.5m wide and made entirely of mudbricks in a casemate fashion.