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Background Information ZT Logbook

Surveying on the citadel mound.

One of the first things we do each year when we get to Ziyaret Tepe is to relocate our survey points on the site and to re-establish our “site grid”. An important thing to know about most archaeologists: we have obsessive interests in recording the precise location of all the ancient walls, pits, hearths, floors, and artifacts we find on our sites. In order to do this, we create detailed gridding systems which allow us to record the location of ancient features and artifacts in three dimensions. Conceptually, our site grid is a projection of north-south and east-west, lines that divide Ziyaret Tepe into 10m by 10m squares, to which we add a height above sea level.

In 1997, on the very first morning of work at the site, I drove a 1.5m long piece of iron rebar into the citadel mound at an arbitrary (and convenient) point and assigned this precise spot the coordinates N1000 E1000, meaning that it was 1000m north and 1000m east of an point well off site (called an “imaginary datum”). From an old Turkish state map, I determined the elevation at that point was 568.09m above sea level. All spatial measurements made subsequently over the past 15 years reference this initial survey point.

Tim surveying on the citadel mound. This photograph was taken in 2007, but it could be from any season as the annual ritual of establishing the site grid looks pretty much the same each year.

So, our typical excavation unit is a 10m by 10m grid square with each corner located at the intersection of two lines in our site grid. For example, N980 E1170 is the grid point 20m south and 170m east of that piece of iron rebar. We then record the precise location of important features or artifacts within these grid squares, again relative to the iron rebar. I can tell you, for example, that artifact ZT 29303 (an iron pin) was found at N989.28 E1173.63 elevation 568.38m (9.28m north and 3.63m east of the grid corner). I could, if I wanted, put the iron pin back in its original findspot within grid square N980 E1170.

I told you we were a bit obsessive.

Why do we do this? Part of the analysis of archaeological sites involves studying the spatial relationships between different artifacts, and between artifacts and their surrounding features. This detailed level of recording is necessary to allow us to reconstruct the site, either on paper or, increasingly, through CAD and other computer assisted modeling.

A few days ago, Chelsea and I went out and, using our total station and my notes from 1997, we relocated that same piece of iron rebar, still firmly in place at N1000 E1000, we established the north-south line, and started laying out survey and excavation points for this year’s work.

I’ll tell you about our first few days of survey in a subsequent post.

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Background Information

The Bronze Palace.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that we would be working in the Bronze Palace on the eastern edge of the high mound. This is the area marked Operation A/N on the topographic map I just posted. I thought it might be useful to give you a little background information on the palace since it will figure prominently in our posts.

First of all the name “Bronze Palace” is my invention, not the building’s ancient name. It is useful shorthand for referring to the building, and people tend to remember catchy names better. The Bronze Palace was used by the Assyrian rulers of Tushhan to house the central administration, conduct state business, and probably served as the residence of the governor. It is likely that the Assyrian king would have slept here when passing through Tushhan to conduct military campaigns along the northern frontier. Our current dating for the Bronze Palace is that it was in use during the 8th century BC.

Our excavations have uncovered only a small portion of the plan of the Bronze Palace, a large courtyard (Room 5) surrounded by a number of smaller rooms. The entire structure is made of mudbrick on a massive scale. Much of the palace was built upon a 2m (= 6 feet) thick platform of solid mudbrick, and in places the walls were decorated with polychrome wall paintings in black, blue, and red paint over white plaster. The paintings are now sadly in fragments, but they give us some sense of the grandeur of the palace in its heyday. Here is a plan of the building.

Room 7 was the throne room (often called the “reception room”) to the Palace. We know this because of parallels with other Assyrian palaces excavated elsewhere, and because of certain special features found here. I’ll tell you more about that later.

So, why the name “Bronze” Palace. Under the courtyard floor, which was paved with large flat baked bricks, we found evidence of at least five cremation burials, fired to a very high temperature, and containing (in addition to human remains) a large hoard of elite Assyrian artifacts made of metal, stone, ivory, and ceramics, including a very substantial collection of bronze artifacts: vessels, pitchers, lamps, furniture fittings. Since bronze was typically recycled in ancient times, it is rare to find such a large quantity of metal in one place, hence the nickname “Bronze Palace”.

Excavation of a sounding below the Bronze Palace to expose a drainage channel which carried water beneath the palace. The Bronze Palace had a well planned and sophisticated plumbing system.

 

A close-up view of the engraved handle of a bronze pitcher found in a cremation burial beneath the courtyard floor of the Bronze Palace. The artifacts found here were of the highest craftsmanship.

You’ll learn much more about the Bronze Palace (as will we!) as the excavations continue this summer. We will be working close to the throne room, and elsewhere in the palace, so stay tuned.

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Background Information

A topographic map of the site.

Archaeologists love maps. We spend a great deal of time and effort making maps of our excavation trenches, our sites, and the broader region in which we work. Below is one of the essentials of any project – a topographic map. In our first season at Ziyaret Tepe (1997), my colleague Guillermo Algaze and I made a map of the entire site using a total station and a hand-held compass. This map shows the changes in elevations across the site.

Topographic map showing the elevation contours, extent of the site (shaded), and the main areas of excavation (designated with a letter A-S).

The citadel mound is in the north-central part of the site, with the lower town extending to the west, east, and south. Our survey work in past years suggests that the city does not extend to the north and today the limit of the site is marked by a modern road. As you can see, despite over a decade of excavation, we have only exposed less the 2% of the ancient city of Tushhan.

I’ll refer back to this map from time to time so that you can orient our different excavation and geophysical projects across the ancient cityscape.

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ZT Logbook

What’s in a potsherd?

My last post explained that we were studying the pottery of the Medieval period as a starting point for this year’s investigation. Here is a collection of photographs showing various elements of the process.

The vast majority of archaeological artifacts come out of the ground badly broken. The beautiful complete or restored museum objects we associate with ancient societies don’t really represent the sorts of materials most archaeologists study because finding complete museum-quality artifacts is rare.

Analyzing pottery relies on careful measurements, great patience, and on experience. What we are doing at our processing station at the Ziyaret Tepe dig house is very low tech. We have balance beam scales, hand-held magnifying glasses, paper forms, and a team of researchers with good eyes and a penchant for details.

Each bag of pottery sherds, which all come from the same well-defined place at the excavation (a “context” in archaeological jargon), is emptied onto a table and sorted first by its fabric. Pottery clay has distinctive colors, textures, and inclusions (fine material added to aid in firing the clay and for decorative purposes) such as sand, chaff, or mica. Since potters in different societies used different clay sources and additives, and had different types of kilns or firing techniques, we are able to distinguish between different pottery traditions and pinpoint the time and place of manufacture for many of the tens of thousands of potsherds we recover each year.

Having sorted the pottery into fabric types, each group of sherds is counted, weighed, and the information recorded on our paper forms for later data entry into our central database. We then divide the sherds by shape (or what we call “form”) which further allows us to discriminate between time periods and different potting practices. We have a master list of forms, built up over a decade of pottery analysis, which illustrates each of our pottery forms, and lists parallels we have found with other sites.

Of course we discover new fabrics, forms, and pottery combinations each season and these are carefully described and added to our descriptions. In this sense one is never “done” with pottery analysis.

What can we do with all this detailed knowledge? Well, when we start to excavate a new area, or a new site in the vicinity, or even when we just find potsherds on the surface of an ancient site 50km away, we are often able to say with some confidence during which periods the site was occupied or when a particular building was used.

As you can see, there is a lot to be learned from even the tiniest shred of evidence!

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Background Information ZT Logbook

Work starts in earnest with pottery from the Medieval period.

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.

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ZT Logbook

A few pictures of the village of Tepe.

Children at play along a village street.
View towards the village from our field camp. Cotton fields are found in many places within the village itself.
A kebap shop along the main street of Tepe. On Fridays, we sometimes give our cook the day off and get lunch in the village.
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ZT Logbook

We made it… and then the electricity went out.

We arrived tired but with luggage intact at the Diyarbakir airport just before midnight on Thursday night. Chelsea and I joined two of our team members, Valentina and Hilary, in the Istanbul airport after a somewhat mad dash through from the customs hall to the domestic terminal.

We were met at the airport in the regional capital by our long-term driver, Mehmet, and two of our team who had arrived earlier via bus from Ankara, Willis and Hayley. If one has the time, the bus is really the way to travel in Turkey. The bus system is cheap, the buses are comfortable (i.e., air-conditioned), and the scenery is spectacular as one goes east from Istanbul and the coast, across the high plateau and into the rugged mountains of the east. Flying is a lot quicker! We had a short wait for one more of our crew, Paola, before driving through the dark down the familiar road to our field camp in the village of Tepe.

The field camp is a series of three buildings owned by the Ministry of Agriculture. We rent all three buildings (but not the grain storage silos) for the two months or so that we are in the field. Below is a picture of one of the buildings. By archaeological standards, this is a luxury accomodation: running water, indoor toilets (although with a manual flush system) and electricity. Well, at least some of the time. In fact, this morning the electricity went out. This is not an unusual occurence, but normally it is out for just a few hours, often less than an hour. Today, however, it stayed off for 11 hours. We had our internet set up and running this morning, and I was eager to check the blog when all the power went out. Such is village life in southeastern Turkey. The entire village was out of electricity as work was done at a local power station, we’re told.

The village has an official population of around 10,000, but it seems unlikely to me that this is accurate; I would estimate maybe 3,000. There is a single main street with houses set behind either side for a few blocks. There is a lot of new construction in the village this year, a new hospital being built with European funding, and a whole row of old shops along the main street had been demolished and new buildings were already rising in their place. I’m told that the price of cotton is high this year (well over 300% of last year’s price) and the village appears to be prospering.

Well, the electricity just went out again. I have about three or four minutes to post this on battery power before we lose the internet again, so I’ll sign off for the night. The pictures will have to wait until we have electricity again. I’ll update you on our work tomorrow and introduce some of the team.

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ZT Logbook

Well, we’re off!

Chelsea and I have made it through the first leg of our journey. We checked into the Cleveland airport with over 200 pounds of luggage, mostly equipment and supplies with a few clothes used as packing material around the computers, total station, electrical restivity meter, etc. Needless to say, archaeologists present a rather unusual challenge for TSA and the airlines. We found out the hard way that a stripped-down frame for an RM15 resitivity setup is NOT allowed as carry-on by TSA. They were unimpressed with my detailed explanation of its use and value. It was a bit of a mad dash back through security to check the frame and get to our gate.

I suppose I should introduce Chelsea Jalbrzikowski. She is a former UAkron undergraduate, now enrolled as a graduate student in Forensic and Biological Anthropology at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. This is Chelsea’s third season with us and is coming out to collect information for her M.A. thesis, studying a collection of Assyrian skeletons, including some very unusual cremation burials found buried under the courtyard pavement of the Bronze Palace. Chelsea also has learned a lot (perhaps more than she wants) about Assyrian pottery and completed a geophysical survey for us in 2009. One of the characteristics of a good field archaeologist is versatility; it’s important to be able to take on whatever tasks need doing.

Chelsea excavating a human skull in Operation R in 2010.

We have a few hours more in Chicago, then it’s on to Istanbul. We are meeting up with more of the crew in Diyarbakir tomorrow night, but I’ll wait to introduce them.

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Last minute preparations.

Hard to believe that it is almost time to leave for Turkey. Ten months of preparation: permit applications, fundraising, recruiting personnel, planning the excavation areas, purchasing equipment and supplies, database management, endless lists, and now we are off. It takes a great deal of logistics to get nearly 30 people from nine countries to all show up in the right place at the right time, and with all the supplies we need for two months of work, but the effort is sure worth it when we get down to work!

On Thursday night, the first wave of archaeologists will arrive in Diyarbakir Airport, to be met by our driver, Mehmet, for a happy reunion. We’ll drive down to Tepe, about an hour to the southeast, and work begins in earnest on Friday. Hopefully we will be able to get our internet connection at the dig house set up quickly, so we can keep the blog updated. If everything goes according to plan, we will open up our sealed depots where the artifacts that are still awaiting analysis from previous seasons are stored, and get to work on Saturday. Inshallah! We are only in the field for two months, so every workday counts. We work six days a week, with Friday off, but this Friday is going to be non-stop work as we set up our dighouse and the laboratories. Each year we put all of our equipment in storage since we only rent our dighouse for the time we are in Turkey, so each season starts with housekeeping.

But first, we have two days of travel ahead.

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Passing on the word.

I received a good suggestion from Mona Malik at the Assyrian Aid Society that I add an option to the blog for those of you who might want to get additional email updates, including some supplemental photos and text, on the Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Expedition, especially after the season ends. Thanks for the idea, Mona!

If you would like to receive periodic email updates on the project, or want to sign up some family, friends or colleagues who might be interested, please let me know via email. My address is matney@uakron.edu. Please put “ZT Email Updates” in the subject line.