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Looking for the Assyrian houses.

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Excavations in the Lower Town started in Operation T yesterday, despite a heat wave that sent temperatures climbing past 45 degrees Celcius (that’s 113 degrees Fahrenheit).

View of the Operation T trenches from the citadel mound. This field was not planted in cotton this year because we made a contract with the owner last summer to leave the field unplanted. With no rain and the intense heat, irrigation is required to grow crops during July and August.

Operation T is where we expect to find the remains of private houses dating the Assyrian period. The operation is located in the southern part of the site, not too far from the line of the fortification wall that once ringed the ancient city.

We first became interested in this area when our magnetic gradiometry surveys of 1999 revealed a series of long, parallel linear features which we interpreted as the street system of Assyrian Tushhan. We briefly excavated a small test trench, Operation M, in 2004 across one of the linear features, confirming our basic assumption that these were streets lined with domestic structures.

Although the recovery of private houses was one of our long-term goals, it wasn’t until this year, with the completion of two major areas of excavation in 2010, that we had the resources to devote to a larger pilot project excavating the private houses in the southern lower town.

Ahmet and Willis lay out survey lines near Operation T.

As you can see in the photograph above, the fields here (recently burned) are pretty featureless. You can see the scars made by agricultural plowing, but the archaeology is buried under an otherwise flat, uniform surface. We have already conducted some electrical resistivity survey (maps to come!), selected an area for excavation, and started to remove the topsoil. The modern plows tend to destroy the top 30-35cm of the archaeological deposits, but we expect to find the Assyrian houses immediately beneath this layer of plowzone.

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.

6 replies on “Looking for the Assyrian houses.”

But it’s a dry heat, right? Yeah… So was the field burned intentionally? Or do they often have fires start in fields?

Looking forward to hearing what you find in that area of the site. I always find “normal” peoples’ houses to be interesting…

Liz

Hi Liz.

The humidity has risen steadily over the years due to the new heavy irrigation practices. It is much less of a dry heat now than it was ten years ago. The water use is now so severe that our well has just run dry at the dig house. The mayor sent the village firetruck over to fill the cistern with water as a short-term solution, but the watertable is dropping as the surface irrigation water evaporates and more water is pumped onto the fields. It also means we have a lot more mosquitoes.

The fires are deliberately set to help the soil by adding ash. In Syria, the practice is not used much, as the stubble on the fields is used by pastoralists for their flocks. There the landowners “rent” their fields to shepherds and gain the benefit of a free manuring. The Turkish government discourages the practice of burning the fields, but it is still widespread.

I’ll keep posting on the progress of the finds. Thanks for the comment!

Something like that was happening in Greece when I was there in the 80s (jeez, thirty years ago almost!). Because of intensive irrigation, particularly for fruit trees the water table dropped. This was a real problem in coastal regions, because sea water was able to seep in and contaminate the ground water in some areas. No idea how that came out….

Sorry to hear about your well troubles – will the well have to be drilled deeper? Or will it be easier to drill a new well? What did the Assyrians use for a water source? (I wrote one of my master’s theses on water sources in Bronze Age Greek sites, and retain an interest…)
Liz

The director of the TMO (the organization that runs the complex) came by today and there are now two plans. One is to connect the entire complex to the village water mains, which sounds like a long-term solution but not a quick one. The other is to drop a pump down into the existing well to bring up what water is available. I’m not sure which is the best solution.

The Assyrians were fond of diverting rivers and making canals, which they did on a massive scale at their imperial capitals. There was one stream (now mostly a dry wadi) that runs through the site. They also had wells and cisterms, of which we have discovered and partially excavated two. There is some evidence, although not conclusive, that they also drew a channel of the Tigris River to the north off to pass near the site. Ziyaret Tepe is not far from the Taurus Mountains, where the river and its tributaries have their sources, so the city would have been well watered in antiquity.

How is Operation T progressing? Have you been able to produce plans of the homes and confirm your findings since Operation M?
Enjoying your blog!

Hi Mona. We are making some great progress on Operation T. Kemalettin has completely exposed the plan of the top layer of what appears to be later, possible Roman, architecture and is busy planning and recording it. We will remove these remains soon and move on to the lower Assyrian levels soon. I’ll post a few pictures soon to show you what the area looks like now. We hope to get to the Assyrian levels very soon, but archaeology is a slow business!

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