Ever since its inception, MAIKI has chosen to adopt a multidisciplinary approach capable of integrating the different methodologies and practices of archaeology, history and epigraphy to reconstruct the peculiar cultural-historical context of the territories under study.

It is with this in mind, and with the intention of giving the study a historical depth that goes as far as to include contemporaneity, that the mission has launched a program of ethnographic research focused on the area on which the Paikuli monument stands and for which the drafting of the archaeological map is in progress.

The ethnographic fieldwork, started in 2013 and still in progress, is carried out in synergy with the archaeological survey and pursues two main lines of research: on the one hand, the reconstruction of recent settlement dynamics, considering, in particular, the transition from nomadism to sedentary life; on the other hand, the study of the religious heritage, both material and immaterial, and of the devotional practices related to it in order to grasp the changes in the local religious landscape, deepening the study of the Qādiriyya, the oldest Sufi brotherhoods present today in Iraqi Kurdistan.