Hard to believe it is Monday already. We spent our first full day here on Friday getting supplies and equipment out of our depot – a large storage unit we rent on the outskirts of the village – and setting up the camp. I drove up to Diyarbakir and informed the regional museum that we had arrived and met with our official government representative, Ahmet, who works at the Diyarbakir Museum. In Turkish, his title is temsilci and Ahmet’s role in our project is to oversee our activities and make sure we follow all the rules, and to help us in local negotiations and with logistics while in the field. We pay his salary during the season and he will stay with us, sending periodic reports on our progress to the Museum. No work starts without a temsilci!
On Saturday, we got down to business. Much of the first two weeks of the project this year will be devoted to analysis of materials excavated in previous seasons. In our depots we have some 180,000 pottery sherds and other artifacts which form an important study collection and which will eventually all be processed and recorded in our on-line database. This doesn’t sound very exciting and, to be truthful, it is a very tedious and time-consuming task, but understanding pottery is the backbone of much archaeological interpretation. Two important facts: (1) pottery sherds are exceptionally durable and will survive quite happily underground for millennia and (2) pottery styles and fashions change through time so that each generation or era has its own distinctive pottery styles. Hence, we can use pottery (among other things) to help us date the various layers and features we find at our sites.
This season we have started with an important collection of Medieval pottery, some of which we can date stylistically to the 12th through 15th centuries AD because some of the forms are well known from other sites where it is found in good contexts. Medieval pottery in the region is striking because some of it has beautifully colored glazes in blues, greens, yellows, purples, and whites, that rival fine ceramics made today. The glazed pottery is pretty well studied, but what we don’t know much about are its more common, and less appealing counterparts, the unglazed pottery vessels. These are plain terracotta vessels used for cooking, eating, fetching water and other mundane daily tasks; the unglazed pottery is poorly documented in our region, in general. So we are investing a considerable amount of time right now making a detailed study of both the glazed and unglazed pottery vessels, where on the site they come from, and how they change through time to build up a solid sequence of Medieval craftsmanship when Ziyaret Tepe was a small village with perhaps a dozen or so houses between 500-800 years ago.
Eventually these results will be published and our colleagues will be able to take our work and expand on it using new excavations and surveys. While I doubt too many Medieval potsherds will make headlines, such basic science is the foundation upon which we start to learn about ancient societies. Sunday and Monday were also devoted to processing the Medieval sherds; we are already starting to see some interesting patterns develop, but there are many more wooden crates of material left to analyze before we can write the final chapter.
