Year: 2011

Kemalettin has closed down Operation T for the season. It was a very interesting excavation area although, contrary to our expectations, we did not find the Assyrian street system and private houses we were seeking. Rather, Kemalettin was able to document two layers of what we believe are Late Roman houses with stone foundations. The upper parts of the walls, which were not preserved, were almost certainly made of mudbrick.

There were quite a few items found on the floors, including an interesting collection of ceramics that will form an important part of our publication of the 2012 season. We also found a set of iron keys and other metal objects that await conservation and further study.

This bowl, from the floor of the northern room of the Operation T house, was found with a layer of burnt (carbonized) seeds burnt at the bottom — perhaps the remains of someone’s meal. We have requested permission to export the seeds so that we can run radiocarbon dates on them and determine at least a rough range of dates for the final use of the building. Other pottery was more damaged and will have to await Hayley’s arrival next year before we can restore and record the rest of this in situ Roman pottery collection.

We also had a surprising number of coins this year. Here are photographs of three more coins, all copper/bronze and very well preserved. The coins will be sent to the Diyarbakir Museum for additional study and eventual display. The center coin, we think, is from the time of Flavius Arcadium Augustus, when he was Emperor of the East, c. AD 395-401. The reverse of the coin, seen here, shows the emperor standing holding a scepter and shield with victory standing to his left crowning him and holding a palm branch. The coin on the right is possibly Constantine II from the mid-4th century AD.

We already knew that the Romans were active in this region in the 4th century AD, when the famous black basalt city walls of Diyarbakir were strengthened, so it is hardly surprising to find occupation of the Late Roman period at Ziyaret Tepe. There are also a number of sites documented from that era in the Upper Tigris River valley. What surprised us was that the Ziyaret Tepe houses were not clear on the geophysical maps we made in previous seasons, nor was there a great abundance of Roman pottery on the surface. I guess that is what makes field archaeology so enjoyable — surprises await us at every turn. Operation T will help us fill in a gap in our overall chronology, but we will have to search elsewhere next year for our elusive Assyrian private houses.

You may have gotten the impression that at Ziyaret Tepe, it’s all work and no play. Well, we do work very hard. We start work just after sunrise, and work throughout the morning with a brief breakfast break. There is a siesta after lunch for a few hours, before returning to work at 4:30 after tea until the official end of the workday at 7pm. That’s a ten working hours at a minimum each day. We work six days a week, so our average work week is 60 hours. Some of us add considerably to that total by working through the siesta, in the late evenings, and on Fridays.

We do, however, enjoy some time to relax. At 7pm each evening, we gather before dinner for our official “happy hour” to enjoy a cold beer, some fresh hazelnuts, almonds, and other treats for which Turkey is famous, and to wind down from the days’ work and savor a brief respite from the heat.

After dinner, most of the team will spend some time sitting beneath our party lights (seen in the photograph above) in front of one of the houses, lounging in the hammock, chatting and rehashing the day’s events. An occassional backgammon, okey, chess or poker game has been known to break out in the somewhat cooler evening hours, but since the alarm rings at 4 or 4:30am, it’s typically early to bed.

On Fridays, we sometimes visit other sites for a brief tour and some time away from Tepe. A few weeks ago, we piled in the van for a trip to the spectacular medieval city of Hasankeyf carved out of cliffs on the Tigris just over 50km downstream from Ziyaret Tepe. We were treated to a presentation of some of the medieval pottery by the excavation team at the Hasankeyf dighouse, took a hike up the cliffs into the ruins of the 13th to 15th century city, and then cooled off at a fish restaurant overhanging the Tigris for lunch.

Last night, as a farewell party for Chelsea who left on the 4am flight this morning, we broke out a stash of marshmallows, chocolate bars and graham crackers after dinner, started up a bonfire, and made s’mores. For some of our European colleagues this was their first introduction to this most American of treats! We are grateful to an anonymous friend who donated the supplies from an American military base as marshmallows and graham crackers are not (yet) a staple in Diyarbakir.

The alarm clocks still rang at 4am, but Chelsea was already on her way home. Safe travels!

One reader had asked for more information about the dog burial (or “canid” as it will be called in the professional literature) in Operation N and Tina has kindly supplied the following.

In general, we don’t have a large population of domestic dogs at Ziyaret Tepe found in any of the time periods. There have been seven canids from Assyrian contexts and four from Medieval contexts. According to Tina’s preliminary assessment, there is no evidence for wild dogs or wolves at the site. There are only a couple of butchered canids at the site, both from the Medieval period. Other than that, there are no other in situ articulated dogs at Ziyaret Tepe.

Here are some very general references about canid burials and the concept of “pets” in the Near East and Mediterranean and Europe. They cover a range of time periods as well. Tina also mentioned that there are numerous depictions of dogs in hunting scenes, looking rather nasty, from Assyrian artwork, but these are probably not pets in our sense of the word.

There was a pet cemetery found at Ashkelon dating to the 5th century BC.

In Mesopotamia, we find dog burials as well as dogs buried in association with humans.

There were also burials of dogs from medieval Germany, for example in Halberstadt from the 13th/14th cent. AD and from Siegburg, ca. 1600 AD.

Finally, there are also several instances of the Greeks having dog burials as well as dogs buried in association with humans.

Hope these references are useful! It is not an exhaustive list, but something to get people interested in the subject started.

After excavating a considerable amount of Roman material in Operation U, John has finally reached the Late Assyrian building for which we’ve been searching! Immediately below the earlier Roman level in the lower town, John and his team found mudbrick walls of a different construction type and alignment, which we think are the Late Assyrian walls.

Unlike the Roman builders, the Assyrians did not use stone foundations for their walls at Ziyaret Tepe, instead digging trenches into the earth and setting their mudbrick wall foundations sometimes as much as 50cm (1.5 feet) below ground. While the mudbrick walls in Operation U appear to conform to the expected plan, what we don’t know yet is whether or not there are any preserved floor levels, or any in situ finds, which would help us definitively date the building and determine its function and history.

In this photograph, which is laboriously stitched together by Hilary from a number of different exposures, you can see the very tops of the preserved walls emerging. There is a long wall running diagonally across the trench from the lower left to upper right. The black and white scale is alongside the right edge of the wall and it is cut by a later burial, which you can see near the smaller scale in the foreground. There is a second wall, perpendicular to the first, in the lower right hand part of the trench. At this point the walls are only exposed for a few centimeters.

Finding mudbrick walls in such a difficult trench is part science, part art, and a lot of experience and patience. John is an expert at delineating the often elusive mudbrick walls at Ziyaret Tepe, and we hope to have a clear plan of the Assyrian building (if our suspicion on the dating is correct!) by the early part of September.