Month: June 2011

The earliest excavated levels at Ziyaret Tepe date back to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, roughly 3000 BC. It’s possible that even earlier remains are buried at the bottom of the citadel mound, but it would be very difficult to get to them.

Most of our digging this year will concentrate on the Late Assyrian period, c. 882 -611 BC at our site. Here is a simple timeline from our website that shows the chronology of the Assyrians.

During this time, the city was called Tushhan and it served as a regional center of the Assyrian Empire. The imperial center was located in what is now modern day Iraq. The Assyrians, at the height of their political and military power, controlled a vast area from Egypt to Iran. Ziyaret Tepe, at the northern edges of the empire, served as a military strongpoint guarding the great Assyrian cities, such as Nineveh, to the south from invasion.

After the Assyrians abandoned the city in 611 BC, there were only sporadic occupations on the citadel mound. During the 13th and 14th centuries AD, there was a small farming village on the high mound. We expect to find some of the remains from this medieval occupation at the beginning of the season.

Here’s a photograph from 2007 that shows the citadel mound in the background. It’s 23 meters (= 70 feet) high and is made entirely of collapsed buildings accumulated over a period of 5,000 years.

In this case, we are excavating in the “lower town”. I thought this might give everyone a sense of the scale of the site. The excavation area is 20 meters by 10 meters (about 60 feet by 30 feet). The raised areas are the mudbrick walls in a small part of a temple treasury that we excavated from 2001 to 2010. The temple (which we have not located yet) was separate from the treasury and was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.

The Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Expedition started in 1997 with a small team of three archaeologists conducting surface survey and topographic mapping. Now in our 15th season, our field crew typically comprises two dozen archaeologists and other specialists, as well as fifty or so local Turkish workers.

The Assyrian city of Tushhan was about 32 hectares (= 80 acres) at its largest extent and probably housed a population of about 5,000. A site this large can never be fully excavated, so we have to carefully select a few areas for intensive scientific excavation. Most summers we excavate in three or four different areas of the site at the same time, depending on our current research questions and personnel.

In 2011, we are digging in one area of the site that has long been part of our excavations, namely the “Bronze Palace” on the high citadel mound. We are also going to start two new areas of excavation, both in the low flat “lower town” that surrounds the citadel. The first of these is an area of Assyrian public housing, that is where we expect the common people lived. The second is a large structure whose function is not clear, but which may represent a wealthy Assyrian’s house or perhaps a small governmental building. I’ll tell you more later about how we know the location of these structures before we start digging!

This blog will follow all three excavation projects as they unfold…