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We did it!

As anyone who has been on an archaeological excavation knows, the last week is always a crazy time. The last of the finds came in from the field as John completed his digging in Operation U, where a small part of a large Late Assyrian public building was unearthed beneath the Roman buildings I mentioned in an earlier post. While these artifacts were being registered, photographed, drawn, and, in a few cases, conserved, the rest of the crew was busy with the final documentation of their work. Workdays were a blur of photocopying, checking drawings, backing up computer files, preparing lists of samples for export, and the finds that are going to the Diyarbakir Museum, writing reports, and all the other things that make archaeology a science.

Then we shifted gears and started to break down the camp. Everything we own in the field – from iron bed frames to our modest stove to the tents we erect each summer to shade our work areas – has to be packed up into a single depot. It is hot, dusty, uninteresting work, but necessary if we are to have a successful start to the 2012 season. This year, the bulk of this work fell to the few remaining team members, especially Azer, Dirk, and Judith. So while I was off in Diyarbakir, Bismil, and Tepe paying wages, social security, and the rest of our bills, this select team was taking seemingly endless rides with a tractor and a few workmen and carefully fitting all of the dig house equipment and supplies into our concrete depot at the edge of town. The camp has 36 rooms, including our laboratories, and sleeps almost thirty people, so you can imagine how much stuff we have.

Azer loading equipment in the depot on our last day in Tepe

So, this is the final post from the field. The six remaining team members – our depot crew, Paola, Mehmet and me – are now sitting by a swimming pool at a hotel in Diyarbakir, enjoying a well earned cold beer. Our dusty little village seems worlds away and our thoughts are turning towards travel home and returning to our other commitments. As we drove away, I saw our workmen in the village buying vegetables, drinking tea at the tea houses, walking with their families, and I was struck by how much we are visitors to Tepe, even if we are persistent ones. It certainly has been an interesting summer.

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With a little help from our friends.

This year we have enjoyed visits from a number of groups — both old friends and new. We are anticipating one final group of vistors this season: a Far Horizons tour group who are arriving at Ziyaret Tepe on Friday en route from Diyarbakir to Mardin. It is very gratifying to know that ancient Tushhan is back “on the map” even if we are still quite a ways off the beaten path. Far Horizons, located in San Anselmo, California, organizes archaeological and cultural tours to all sorts of interesting out-of-the-way places. Check out their website if you are looking for a really adventurous trip. You may even end up in Tepe!

As I mentioned at the very start of the season, putting together an archaeological expedition of this size is an expensive proposition and we get our funds through a variety of public and private sources. Our visitors from Far Horizons have very kindly given donations in support of our fieldwork and I would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge their help in this year’s success. Thanks to Ronald Guttmann, Diana and Peter White, Susan Silver,Tony and Lawrie Green, Willian Tate, and the John Miller family for making this year’s excavations possible. I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank Richard Behrman for his generous on-line contribution to the 2011 field season. One reason we’ve been able to pursue our scientific explorations this year is because of your financial help.

So, safe journeys to the Far Horizons group and we will see you all on Friday!

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On the road.

One of the most important elements of any dig is a reliable means of transport. With a large team and piles of equipment, the daily logistics of moving from the dig house to the excavations and back, along with numerous other trips to Tepe, Bismil, and Diyarbakir for shopping, museum business, dealing with banks and the like is tricky. We are fortunate to have a truly outstanding driver in Mehmet Tekin, who has been with us for many years now.

Mehmet at the excavation house.

In addition to driving, Mehmet is constantly repairing equipment, organizing house and dig logistics, running endless errands, shopping, and even doing geophysical survey. He full of boundless energy and good cheer, even when his normally spotless minivan is filled with the dust of a hard day’s work. As you can see below, we fill the back of Mehmet’s minivan each day with smiling excavators, equipment, newly discovered artifacts and copious quantities of dirt! Those tin buckets next to Dirk are full of pottery ready for processing at the dig house.

The right hand photograph shows (from l to r): John, Jonathan, Kemalettin, Willis, and Dirk. Nineb is hiding just behind Dirk. The van holds 15 people when it isn't full of dig equipment and finds.

Mehmet lives in the nearby town of Bismil with his wife and four children, although his home village is a smaller place a few kilometers from Tepe. When he isn’t working with us, he serves as our official government site guard, drives between Bismil and Diyarbakir as a dolmus driver, and sometimes works as a bus driver for school children.

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Wrapping up Operation T.

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.

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Hayley tackles giant ceramic jigsaw puzzles.

When you go to a museum, you expect to see complete, or at least nearly complete, artifacts that can be appreciated as much for their artistry and beauty as for their information content. In the field, the reality is that only a tiny fraction of the artifacts we find are complete. Most are broken, bent, missing parts, badly corroded, and, in some cases, barely recognizable. One of our newest team members, Hayley Lacis, took on the task this summer of piecing together as many of the broken pottery vessels we have found as possible. It’s like putting together jigsaw puzzles… without the box… or all the pieces. It is amazing how good she was at finding joins in the pottery; nearly complete vessels appeared to grow out of a mass of fragments allowing us to make thorough descriptions of the original pottery shapes and functions.

Below, Hayley is applying a weak solution of hydrochloric acid to remove the salt and mineral encrustations on a rim sherd of a huge pithos storage jar (it once stood as tall as she is) as part of her reconstruction work. Note that she has on goggles and protective gloves. Hayley’s undergraduate degree was in Classics from Mt. Holyoke College, and she is planning next year to apply to archaeological conservation programs for graduate school. She’s been working at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston since 2008 and with the Giza Archive Project, so she has lots of experience with archaeology and ancient artifacts.

Once Hayley has put together as many pieces as possible from our sherd batches, we draw the vessels and photograph them, record their fabrics, decoration, and other details and enter the information into our extensive database. The most complete and interesting vessels go to the Diyarbakir Museum for their study collection, or for eventual display. The rest, sadly, are taken back to Ziyaret Tepe for reburial.

Hayley peeks around a photographic background in Hilary's studio. She is actually supporting the partial vessel, reconstructed from dozens of fragments, from behind for the photograph.

Like all of our staff, Hayley has many other talents, including being a fine watercolorist. With her permission, I have made a small collection of some of her archaeological-themed watercolors from this year for you to enjoy. Hayley left a few days ago for the US. She and Willis are headed back to school and work and are busy planning their October wedding. Best of wishes to both of them from all of us!

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Happy Birthday, Mom!!!

Okay, this may not be directly related to archaeology, but I know my 86-year-old mother is checking the blog daily, so I wanted to wish her a happy birthday from our sunny little village of Tepe. It has been many, many years since I was in the US on her birthday.

For those of us who spend every summer digging, often for two or three months at a time, being in the field is a luxury and a passion. One of the reasons we can pursue field archaeology is because we have a support team back at home: parents, spouses, partners, children, and friends who keep life at home rolling along while we are out of touch and busy with the field. They worry about us, deal with the myriad problems that arise in our absences, make sure the kids are ready for the first day of school, and generally make it possible for us to pursue archaeology thousands of miles from home.

So, Mom, this is just a small acknowledgement of your contribution to the archaeology of southeastern Turkey on your birthday with lots of love.