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The Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Expedition is Back for 2013!

It’s late July and some of you have been wondering if the Ziyaret Tepe project was ever going to come on-line! We had a few delays in getting our excavation permit this year – it is a complex process and changes in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism over the winter meant that our usual start date in early July was pushed back nearly three weeks, but the good news is that the team has made it to the field and we are starting work. This is our last excavation season and we have a great deal we want to accomplish. I hope you have time to follow along.

The first few team members arrived last Friday evening in Diyarbakir, hurried down to the schoolhouse in Bismil that is our base of operations again this year, and started setting up the camp. Over the weekend, while we transformed the schoolhouse into a dighouse, our numbers swelled to over a dozen archaeologists. There are some familiar names and faces, and a few new ones. I’ll introduce them to you over the coming weeks.

On Monday morning, we were joined by our government representative for the year, Ms. Esme Bedirhanoglu, an archaeologist who works at the Diyarbakir Museum. Esme hanim will be helping us navigate the local bureaucracy and overseeing our progress. On Monday, we also registered our work force of 48 local laborers for social security and tax purposes, and went on a shopping spree to make sure Necmi had enough food to feed our hungry team. In the evening we negotiated with local land owners for the rental of two parcels where we want to work, planned out our first day’s work, and got the equipment ready to go. A long, productive Monday.

Alarm clocks rang at 3:30am this morning and by four o’clock the breakfast table was buzzing with excitement for the first digging day. (Mind you, that 4am buzz quiets down pretty quickly as the season works it’s way into a routine). Tractors, shovels, wheelbarrows, canvas for shades, surveying equipment, and nearly sixty people ascended the high mound on Tuesday morning to start work. Hard to believe we landed in Diyarbakir less than four days ago!

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On the high mound, the workmen spent the day cleaning out Operation AN, which was filled with a good thistle crop after heavy spring rains. Readers of our previous blogs will remember that this is the area of the Bronze Palace, where Dr. Dirk Wicke from Mainz University has been working for a number of seasons.

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We have three excavations planned in the lower town this summer, which I will tell you much more about in a later post. Here the workmen are just breaking ground in Operation Y, directed by Dr. Mary Shepperson of University College London. The lower town is not currently being used for crops, as you can see, although many of the fields surrounding the site have a healthy crop of corn, which makes a change from previous years. Very few of the agricultural fields are still being planted in cotton, and a few were planted in wheat (already harvested), a traditional crop grown in this region for many millennia. Below the surface here in Operation Y, we think that there is a large mudbrick building of Late Assyrian date (c. 9th – 7th centuries BC) of a type typically called an “arsenal”. More on that later. As you can see Mary has quite a bit of digging over a 10m x 20m area before we get down to architectural remains.

By the way, the new header and these photographs were taken by our new photographer for the 2013 season, Ian J. Cohn. You’ll meet him later as well.