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The first team members arrive in Turkey

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Getting twenty-five team members from eight countries to arrive in the same place at the same time with all the equipment and supplies needed for a large expedition takes a lot of planning. After months of bureaucratic paperwork, buying tickets, arranging itineraries, and making contingency plans, the first of our team has arrived in the southeast. It was an absolute blistering day when Valentina arrived in Batman from Milan; the local temperature was reported at 54 degrees Celsius (= 129 degrees Fahrenheit) which is hot, even by our standards! By the time that Jordan, Azer, and I got to the Batman airport, the sun was down and the heat of the day dispersing.

There were the usual hiccups in our travel this year. Our local airport in Diyarbakir is closed for three months due to renovation, requiring us to reroute everyone through the much smaller Batman airport nearly 100km east of Diyarbakir by road. My luggage, including all of our geophysical survey equipment, didn’t arrive in the Istanbul airport from New York, having been sent to Rome instead. Thankfully, the airline was able to recover the bags and deliver them to me during a long 9 hour layover in Istanbul and, despite considerable shuffling of contents during multiple inspections, everything seems to be in place. Of course, all the contents of the checked bags are carefully inventoried beforehand so I can ensure that nothing has gone missing during transport. Archaeology is the art of making lists!

The big challenge this year in setting up our camp is that our traditional dig house, which I described last year in an earlier post, has been rented to another group. The place where we’ve stayed since 2002 is a government-owned compound and the new director rented the dig house to a group of workers from DSI, the organization building the Ilisu Dam that will flood the site. So, we are looking for a new home for the year. After 10 years of comfortable living in a well known location, this will be a season of change.

As you can imagine, it is not easy to find a compound with living and working facilities for 25 people in the small village of Tepe. At the moment, we are coordinating with the Diyarbakir Museum director, Nevin Soyukaya, and local officials to secure access to a large school building in Tepe which is currently vacant since school is out for the summer. Our driver and cook, Mehmet and Necmi, have been scouring the village of Tepe and nearby villages for other possible working places, but we are short on good options right now.

So, as the team assembles over the next few days, our top priority is to find a dighouse, fix it up, move in our belongings from the depot, and get the camp in working order. Normally we can do this in just one day… but this so far this does not appear to be a normal season. Part of the challenge, and I suppose one might even say the fun, of field archaeology is conquering the unexpected, whether it is an unexpected ancient find, or the need to change logistical gears suddenly. Keep your fingers crossed that the school house is suitable and available for our team this year. We hope to be digging by Saturday.

By matney

Dr. Matney is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and Classical Studies at the University of Akron. He is the Director of the Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Expedition.

One reply on “The first team members arrive in Turkey”

The airport is called “Batman”? how cool is that? Sorry to hear about your dig house – I’ve had to find houseing for crews and I feel for you. Good luck on finding a place. I’m looking forward to your posts – and sorry I won’t be teaching Intro this fall and use them in class.

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