Category: Team members

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Team members ZT Logbook

New eyes look at an old mystery.

As readers are starting to appreciate, many discoveries at Ziyaret Tepe are not made immediately in the field, but only after long and careful study of finds made by specialists in the laboratory. This is true at all archaeological projects. Back in 2007 and 2008, we recovered two cremation burials in the Bronze Palace, the large Late Assyrian building on the high mound excavated by Dirk. The palace, you may remember dates to the 9th through 7th centuries BC. A total of five cremation burials have been recovered from under the courtyard pavement. This is a highly unusual, and frankly un-Assyrian, means of burial and we have wondered since their discovery who was buried here.

Part of the answer has come from the work of one of our newest team members, Dr. Sandra Lösch. Sandra has a lot of experience identifying human remains. She is the Head of the Physical Anthropology section of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at Bern University in Switzerland. Between her lab work at the Institute, conferences and many field projects, Sandra was able to fly in especially to look at the occupants of two of our cremation burials, N-070 and N-249.

Sandra_Loesch

Unlike a normal inhumation or crime scene, the intense heat of the cremation has reduced the human bones to very small fragments, making Sandra’s work challenging indeed. Here she is at work in her lab, looking for clues as to the sex and age of our bodies. In this case, we weren’t even sure how many occupants each cremation held.

Sandra was able to determine that N-070 and N-249 each held one occupant. The former was an older male, aged between 30 and 50 years. The latter was an adult female aged between 30 and 45 years old when she died. One indiator of human age at death, human teeth, could not be used because the heat of the cremations – in excess of 800 degrees Celcius – had destroyed the crowns of the teeth! Instead, Sandra was able to utilize the fusion of sutures in the skull and bony growths on the vertebrae to provide a rough estimate of age. Here’s a vertebrae from the male buried in N-070. I’ve highlighted the bony growth, a paleopathology that is normally not present and one that can affect mobility and was probably quite painful for this individual.

N070zt25573

Sex was determined by a number of indicators. Differences in the shape of the pelvis, overall robusticity, and even the weight of the preserved bones can be used to provide a guide for determining sex. Of course, we have to be careful with cremations since the bones shrink quite a bit when heated, but as an experienced physical anthropologist, Sandra has a wealth of comparative material from which to draw.

Now, as for the names, ranks, and the answer to the question of why these two individuals were buried in this fashion under the courtyard of an Assyrian palace, we need to keep digging into the rich archives in our depot and to continue our detailed analysis for more answers.

Unfortunately Sandra is leaving tomorrow for a conference in Rio. We wish her safe travels and hope she can return during our 2014 study season to continue this line of forensic investigation on the other skeletons recovered at Ziyaret Tepe.

 

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Meet our new colleagues from Warsaw.

We have a number of new team members this season bringing fresh perspectives, skills, and experiences to the Ziyaret Tepe project. From previous posts, you know that ours is a very diverse project and, over the years, scholars from over two dozen countries have participated in surveys, excavations, and analyses conducted in the field annually since 1997.

We are very fortunate this summer to have a group of ceramics experts joining us from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, led by Dr. Anna Wodzińska. Anna’s specialization is in Egyptian archaeology and she has worked for many seasons on the pottery of Giza. This season, she has been working to learn Assyrian pottery with our senior ceramicist, Azer Keskin, a long-time Ziyaret team member and Ph.D. candidate at the State University of New York in Binghamton. Anna has brought a team of her students from Warsaw to help with the large backlog of pottery that needs to be processed: Agnieszka Poniewierska, and Barbara Jakubowska are Master’s students at the University of Warsaw. Natalia Kadzidłowska is completing her Bachelor’s degree there. Their job is quite daunting, namely to describe, draw, and process as much of our stored ceramic material as possible.

Zuhal, Anna, Aga, Natalia, and Basia during an excursion off site. It is rare to see them away from their desks!

Their work with the pottery sherds – by far our most common artifacts – allows us to interpret the date, function, and development of the buildings, fortifications, pits, graves, and other contexts that are excavated by the field crew. This work demands a great attention to detail and is as tiring as any at the site. Anna and her students fill out standardized paper forms for each group (“batch”) of pottery recovered from the excavations. They code the fabric (= the characteristics of the clay from which the pottery is made), decoration, and shape (or “form”) of each of the pottery sherds, entering the data into our integrated central computer database. We can then analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of different pottery types as part of our broader interpretive project.

Although such work is not glamorous, it is the backbone of all archaeological interpretation. Anna and her team have made impressive progress and as they gain familiarity with the Late Assyrian pottery, they have been working more quickly and efficiently each week. On a good day, they can process between three and five tomato crates of pottery. (Note: our standard unit of measure for quantities of pottery is the wooden crates used to move vegetables to market). Each crate holds plastic bags containing anywhere from a few dozen large pottery sherds to hundreds of smaller fragments.  There are about 900 tomato crates of pottery from previous seasons in the depot at the moment, some fully analyzed, others awaiting attention.

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On the road.

One of the most important elements of any dig is a reliable means of transport. With a large team and piles of equipment, the daily logistics of moving from the dig house to the excavations and back, along with numerous other trips to Tepe, Bismil, and Diyarbakir for shopping, museum business, dealing with banks and the like is tricky. We are fortunate to have a truly outstanding driver in Mehmet Tekin, who has been with us for many years now.

Mehmet at the excavation house.

In addition to driving, Mehmet is constantly repairing equipment, organizing house and dig logistics, running endless errands, shopping, and even doing geophysical survey. He full of boundless energy and good cheer, even when his normally spotless minivan is filled with the dust of a hard day’s work. As you can see below, we fill the back of Mehmet’s minivan each day with smiling excavators, equipment, newly discovered artifacts and copious quantities of dirt! Those tin buckets next to Dirk are full of pottery ready for processing at the dig house.

The right hand photograph shows (from l to r): John, Jonathan, Kemalettin, Willis, and Dirk. Nineb is hiding just behind Dirk. The van holds 15 people when it isn't full of dig equipment and finds.

Mehmet lives in the nearby town of Bismil with his wife and four children, although his home village is a smaller place a few kilometers from Tepe. When he isn’t working with us, he serves as our official government site guard, drives between Bismil and Diyarbakir as a dolmus driver, and sometimes works as a bus driver for school children.

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Team members ZT Logbook

Hayley tackles giant ceramic jigsaw puzzles.

When you go to a museum, you expect to see complete, or at least nearly complete, artifacts that can be appreciated as much for their artistry and beauty as for their information content. In the field, the reality is that only a tiny fraction of the artifacts we find are complete. Most are broken, bent, missing parts, badly corroded, and, in some cases, barely recognizable. One of our newest team members, Hayley Lacis, took on the task this summer of piecing together as many of the broken pottery vessels we have found as possible. It’s like putting together jigsaw puzzles… without the box… or all the pieces. It is amazing how good she was at finding joins in the pottery; nearly complete vessels appeared to grow out of a mass of fragments allowing us to make thorough descriptions of the original pottery shapes and functions.

Below, Hayley is applying a weak solution of hydrochloric acid to remove the salt and mineral encrustations on a rim sherd of a huge pithos storage jar (it once stood as tall as she is) as part of her reconstruction work. Note that she has on goggles and protective gloves. Hayley’s undergraduate degree was in Classics from Mt. Holyoke College, and she is planning next year to apply to archaeological conservation programs for graduate school. She’s been working at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 2008 and with the Giza Archive Project, so she has lots of experience with archaeology and ancient artifacts.

Once Hayley has put together as many pieces as possible from our sherd batches, we draw the vessels and photograph them, record their fabrics, decoration, and other details and enter the information into our extensive database. The most complete and interesting vessels go to the Diyarbakir Museum for their study collection, or for eventual display. The rest, sadly, are taken back to Ziyaret Tepe for reburial.

Hayley peeks around a photographic background in Hilary's studio. She is actually supporting the partial vessel, reconstructed from dozens of fragments, from behind for the photograph.

Like all of our staff, Hayley has many other talents, including being a fine watercolorist. With her permission, I have made a small collection of some of her archaeological-themed watercolors from this year for you to enjoy. Hayley left a few days ago for the US. She and Willis are headed back to school and work and are busy planning their October wedding. Best of wishes to both of them from all of us!

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Team members ZT Logbook

Assyrian language heard again at ancient Tushhan.

It has been over two millennia since the Assyrian language was last spoken at Ziyaret Tepe/Tushhan, but during a recent visit by Saliba Ozman, His Grace the Bishop of Mardin and Diyarbakir of the Syriac Orthodox Church (with the scarlet shirt in the photo) and Dairoyo (monk) Yousif Said of Halab (Aleppo), one of our team, Nineb Lamassu, gave them a tour in a modern variant of the ancient Assyrian tongue.

Nineb (on right) explaining the excavations to our visitors.

The bishop and his party came from the monastery of Deir al-Zafaran, so named because the monks used to produce the aromatic spice saffron to support the monastery located some 60km south of Tepe. Our team has visited the monastery in past seasons and enjoyed the hosipality of His Grace, so it was our pleasure to host him in return and provide a brief tour and lunch.

 

Kemalettin provides a tour of the excavations in Operation T.

 

We made an audio recording of Nineb’s tour and I have a brief five minute audio clip (link below) that I hope you will be able to download and enjoy.

Ozman Visit

Nineb is a language scholar and speaks most of the languages of the region, including Arabic, Turkish, Syriac, and Kurdish. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and is planning to start a PhD in philology and/or archaeology at the University of Cambridge. He’s been a member of the Ziyaret Tepe team for several years now and has learned a great deal about archaeology and the material culture of southeastern Turkey.

If you are ever in Mardin, a beautiful old city overlooking the northern plains of Syria from the Turkish mountains of the Tur Abdin, then plan a stop to see the monastery and enjoy the bishop’s hospitailty, the grand architecture and stunning views.

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Team members ZT Logbook

Unexpected on the citadel mound.

On the citadel mound, a Medieval pit has revealed a surprising find – a completely intact canine burial at the bottom of what otherwise appeared to be a simple refuse pit.

As you know from earlier posts, we have lots of pits from the Medieval period cutting into the Bronze Palace, many of which have animal bones in them. Usually, though, the bones show evidence of butchering and burning and this dog was clearly different. In the photograph above you can see some baked bricks which are part of a Late Assyrian floor, clearly disturbed by a later pit.

Tina Greenfield, a PhD candidate in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, is our team’s zooarchaeologist and she was out of the lab and into the field to help with the excavation and recording of the dog as soon as word got back from the excavations.

Tina has worked as a zooarchaeologist at sites across the globe, in Serbia, Romania, South Africa, Turkey, Israel, and Canada, where she's at home in Winnipeg. Her lab here in Tepe includes a modest comparative collection of the most common animals found at the site.

Tina has been on the project for a number of years and has analyzed tens of thousands of animal bones from all periods and many of our operations. She is writing her dissertation on the animal bones from the Late Assyrian period, comparing butchery and consumption practices in different areas of the ancient city. Just like today, the most common animals consumed in the Assyrian period were sheep and goats, the descendents of whom still are frequent visitors to the excavations.

Visitors in the lower town.

Back to the canine burial, Tina tells me that this was an adult male dog, at least 7-9 years old based on the fusion of his bones and his morphology (e.g., very long canines). We’re not sure how he died but interestingly we found five fish bones in association with the dog burial, a very rare find at Ziyaret Tepe. While we can’t be certain, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the dog’s last meal may have been fish from the Tigris River! Dirk has reported that in addition to the animal bones, the pit contained pottery sherds (they are ubiquitous on the site) and a small iron knife. The latter is now in the conservation lab where Lourdes and Friederike will have an opportunity to examine it more carefully and do some restoration work.

 

The dog skeleton was carefully cleaned in situ by Tina, then drawn by Paola, and photographed by Hilary. Dirk made precise measurements of its location and condition and then we removed the bones to the lab, where Tina will give the dog a full description in our project database. We don’t know the dog’s breed, but is was clearly a domesticated dog and, given his burial treatment, perhaps even a family pet.

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Lourdes and Friederike provide expertise in artifact conservation.

You may have noticed in my last post that the coin in the photograph was clean, even if it was old, worn, and hard to read. Of course, artifacts don’t come out of the ground looking that good. At Ziyaret Tepe, we have two trained artifact conservators who spend endless hours mechanically cleaning, stablizing, chemically treating, and restoring artifacts so they are ready for study and display. Theirs is one of the most technical and challenging fields of archaeology.

We have two excellent professional artifact conservators, both experienced team members at Ziyaret Tepe. Lourdes Mesa Garcia (above in our conservation laboratory) works as a freelance conservator out of Madrid, Spain and has worked at a number of sites. Most recently, she was senior Conservator for the “Colossi of Memnon Conservation Project of Amenhotep III Temple” in Egypt.

Friederike is cleaning the fibula under the microscope. Bronze requires specialist treatment to stop active corrosion ("bronze rot") and to stabilize the material once excavated.

Friederike Moll-Dau (above) works as a freelance conservator at different institutions in Germany and most recently spend a long period as Conservator at the China Project of the Romisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum of Mainz, Germany. This was collaborative project between the German Ministry of Education and Research and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology. Friederike worked in particular on fabrics from a queen’s tomb while in China.

Before and after photographs of a few artifacts. Notice how much more detail you can see after Lourdes and Friederike have completed their work. These artifacts are ready for the museum.

So here are some before and after pictures featuring some of Lourdes and Friederike’s work. From left to right are an Assyrian bronze arrowhead, a bronze fibula, and a frit stamp seal with a tree motif. As you can see from the scale, these are small objects and for most of each day Lourdes and Friederike are working at their microscopes, using scapels, drills, and brushes to clean even the most delicate artifacts. Some of our most exciting discoveries are made in the conservation laboratory, when the details of the corroded and encrusted artifacts we dig up are finally revealed.

Artifact conservation takes a great deal of training and a solid science background. Lourdes has a Diploma in Conservation and Archaeology and Paper Conservation, an MA in Preventative Conservation and Exhibitions, a degree in Geography and History, specializing in Art History, and an MA in Art History. Friederike has both a Diploma in the conservation of archaeological objects and an MA in Prehistoric Archaeology. They both have a wealth of knowledge and experience in ancient materials, modern chemistry, and patience! I’ll show you more of their work in future posts.

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Jonathan Pilgrim takes to the field.

Last week the team was boosted with the arrival of Jonathan Pilgrim from England. Jonathan is just finishing a gap year before heading off to university, and comes to Ziyaret Tepe having worked teaching English in a school in Uganda, followed by some travelling in the Far East. Jonathan has quickly proved himself an invaluable member of the team and a quick learner – mastering the total station, helping with the resistivity survey, working on the database, and excavating.

Here Jonathan is excavating a pit in the Bronze Palace on the citadel mound. Next week he will be descending to the lower town to work in the newly commenced Operation U. Jonathan has taken the long working days, intense heat, and varied requests for his time and energy in stride. In the afternoon shifts Jonathan has been working on processing ceramics: weighing, counting, sorting by type and fabric – not necessarily the most glamorous aspect of archaeology but a vital part of the scientific process.

When he returns to England, Jonathan will be starting an undergraduate degree at the University of Durham in Human Geography.

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David Astbury joins the excavations in the lower town.

Not every dig can boast a bona fide rock musician on staff, but we can! David Astbury, one of our new recruits and an archaeology student from the University of Newcastle, spent the previous 12 years touring and recording with his band Headway, including a stint in Los Angeles. David is from Warwickshire in England and is enjoying the experience of dig life in rural southeastern Turkey. His other digging has been in the UK, but we hope that he will decide to move south in his archaeological interests.

Here’s David cleaning a section (or “profile”) in Operation T. As you can see we are still just below the modern surface. He’s learning plenty of new skills with us, including a stint doing geophysical survey and, of course, pottery recording in the afternoon.

 

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Some new faces.

Part of life on the dig is the constant shifting of personnel as outside commitments and the complex schedules of academic life require early departures and late arrivals. Since we have to submit our permit requests in December for excavations starting seven or eight months later, it is inevitable that the plans we set up in winter require revision in the early summer.

One of our senior ceramicists, Valentina Vezzoli, recently returned to Europe to take up a new position as Charge de Recherches at FNRS (CReA-Patrimoine Universite Libre Bruxelles) in Belgium. Valentina brought her experience in medieval pottery from Apamea and Shayzar in Syria to Ziyaret Tepe and was able to finalize our pottery typology and set up the protocols for recording our medieval material. Although she was only here for a few weeks, Valentina got a tremendous amount of work done.

Marie and Valentina atop the high mound of ancient Amedi in Diyarbakir. We visited the site with its impressive view of the surrounding Tigris River valley and briefly examined a collection of medieval pottery from recent Turkish excavations there.

While she was here, Valentina also trained our newest ceramacist, Marie Jensen, a recent graduate from the University of Copenhagen in Near Eastern Archaeology. Marie is carrying on the work started by Valentina in recording the medieval ceramics from both the citadel mound and lower town excavations. And, of course, Marie is not working alone as both Chelsea and Hilary take time out from their other duties to help Marie with the copious medieval pottery.

We wish Valentina the best of luck in Bruxelles. She will be working with us during the “off season” to bring the final report of the medieval village at Ziyaret Tepe to publication, so we look forward to a long collaboration. You are missed here in the field!