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Team members

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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News from Operation U.

Operation U, the third excavation of the season, has started in the southeastern corner of the lower town, directed by John MacGinnis, seen below clearing the excavation area. Unlike the other fields where we are working this year, Operation U was planted this year in wheat, which was harvested shortly before we arrived, leaving knee-high stalks.

Having surveyed the area where we wanted to work, we negotiated with the local landowner, Haci Isa Chelik, who kindly gave use permission to burn a section of the fields and dig there for the season. We managed a controlled burn of an area about 50m by 50m in extent, which left a heavy burnt ash layer over our excavation area.

Operation U is of particular interest to use because we were able to see what appears to be a large structure, approximately 30m square, in a magnetic gradiometry map completed in 2009. Our current interpretation is that this building, located adjacent to the city wall, may have been an elite residence, or perhaps a minor public building.

In Hilary’s panoramic photograph above, you can see a low rise behind our black field, followed by a significant dip. The low rise is the line of the city wall and the dip was perhaps an ancient moat or canal outside the city’s fortifications.

John started excavating in two 5m by 5m squares a couple of days ago, and I’ve done some electrical resistivity mapping in the area as well to try and get more details of the building to help John locate his trenches effectively.

This is our first excavation in the southeastern lower town which, for years, has been extremely swampy. You can see that there is now a regular canal system draining the fields which are planted in cotton, making the area available for archaeological excavation. We have high hopes that this untested part of the site will produce a rich record of Assyrian urban life.

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Assyrian burial discovered in Bronze Palace.

Work on the citadel mound is proceeding well. Dirk has opened up two new areas of excavation: one on the northern edge of the Bronze Palace and one encompassing the area of the two electrical resistivity anomalies I mentioned in an earlier post.

In the northern grid squares, we were fortunate to find only a few later disturbances (e.g., pits) in the Bronze Palace. The Assyrian levels are immediately below the surface and, in fact, it appears that the floors of the rooms at this point have been truncated by modern erosion. Dirk is an expert at tracing the lines of mudbrick walls or wall foundations, even in such shallow deposits, so we should be able to recover the plan of the northernmost rooms of the palace.

We were also fortunate to find a well preserved Late Assyrian burial, with grave goods, immediately below the surface. The body was originally buried in a pit beneath the floor of the palace. Although the floor that sealed the burial is gone, we were able to discern the edges of the inhumation pit. The photo below shows Chelsea in the process of excavating the body. There is a complete  pottery vessel (with only one piece broken off), as well as a metal pin or fibula at the hip, presumably pinned to the garments used in the burial but long since decayed.

In the photograph above, the skull is to the left of the pottery vessel. You can just make out the eye socket at the ground level. The top of the skull is broken. Chelsea is cleaning the long bones of the arm. By late this morning, she had cleared the pelvis, arms, and most of the upper torso. It appears that the legs, however, are missing, having been taken away in the medieval period during the construction of a tannur, or bread oven, which is just to the left of this photograph.

Once Chelsea is done cleaning the bones, the skeleton will be drawn and photographed in place, then the bones will be removed to our human osteology laboratory at the dig house for detailed description and analysis. From human remains we can often determine basic characteristics, such as sex, age, and stature, as well as documenting various pathologies such as diseases, traumas, and the overall health of the individual. Chelsea’s report on the burial will become part of the preliminary and final publications of the project’s activities.

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Enter the Romans?

The excavations in the lower town in Operation T have almost finished clearing off the plow zone, although the bottom of the scars left by the plows are still visible as long parallel furrows in the excavation area. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we expected to find Late Assyrian architecture close to the surface. To our surprise, however, we have started to recover artifacts dating to the Roman period, including rooftiles and a very distinctive Roman pottery type previously not documented at Ziyaret Tepe.

The top right hand corner of this photograph shows the roof of our current dig house which has, as you can see, a tile roof using baked clay as a building technology which is nearly 2000 years old in this region (although the most common form of roof is a flat compressed mud roof laid over wooden beams and reeds). The top left corner is a fragmentary roof tile we found at Ziyaret Tepe in 2003 in Operation J in the western lower town. Below left are a few of the fragments that have been recovered in the past few days in Operation T. The shape of the tiles is very distinctive. Below right is a piece of fine ceramic ware, just the rim and part of the body of a vessel, that is very likely to be of Roman date.

Does this mean that there is a Roman house in the lower town in Operation T? Not necessarily. We know from elsewhere at Ziyaret Tepe that Roman roof tiles were sometimes re-used for later buildings.

That said, this morning Kemalettin showed me some stone wall foundations that may be associated with the rooftiles. We’ll need a few more days of digging to get to the bottom of this deposit. What does seem certain is that this part of the lower town was inhabited or used, perhaps only briefly, after the end of the Assyrian period in 610 BC.

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Team members

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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Visitors both welcome, and not so welcome.

On Friday, the village of Tepe was enveloped in a great dust cloud which dropped visibility down to less than 200m (we couldn’t see the Tigris River from the citadel mound or the village from the dig house) and trapped in the heat, which rose to 48 degrees Celcius (118 degrees Fahrenheit). The nights, usually considerably cooler in late July, remained uncomfortably hot. Usually dust storms blow in with a great wind and are gone within half a day, but this unwelcome visitor stayed with us through Saturday night.

Sunday morning came with welcome relief, the skies had cleared and temperature dropped considerably. We cleaned off the layer of brown dust that had blanketed everything in the camp and life got back to normal.

We then had some welcome visitors on Sunday morning; a rare treat in Diyarbakir province. Professor David Schloen from the University of Chicago and team of archaeologists and specialists working with him stopped by during a long weekend trip from their excavations at the Iron Age site of Zincirli, ancient Sam’al, some 360km west of Ziyaret Tepe. They toured the mound and our current excavations and came down to the dig house to meet our staff and see some of the recent finds. You can find out more about the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli at their website, including more details on the discovery of the inscribed stelae of Katumuwa in 2008, which many of you read about in the New York Times.