Follow the archaeological excavations at Ziyaret Tepe, the Assyrian city of Tushhan, in southeastern Turkey with daily updates on the latest discoveries, journal entries from the excavators and scientific specialists, and a candid snapshot of life on a real dig in the modern Middle East
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.
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.
As some of you have noted, we added Twitter and Facebook buttons to the individual stories so people can share the Ziyaret Tepe posts more easily. We don’t have a separate Facebook page for the project, but please do share the posts with your friends. As of last Sunday, the 24th of July, we had over 2,200 unique pageviews, so the word is out there. I’d like to encourage our readers to send comments to the posts and let us know which aspect of the dig you want to hear more about. Thanks for all the support!
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.
The digging crew started to arrive a few days ago and we start the excavations tomorrow, so all the months of planning are finally at an end.
Dirk Wicke from Mainz University and three of his students, Judith Dosch, Fabian Heubel, and Sarah Reisel, as well as an archaeology student from Britain, David Astbury, have arrived. Our senior Turkish colleague, Kemalettin Koroglu from Marmara University is also here now, having driven across the country from Istanbul to join the team. We have three more excavators still to arrive, but the digging is soon underway with 35 local workmen meeting us at the site at 4:30am tomorrow.
Much of the day will be spent getting the equipment out of our depot, setting up the field camp (everything from tents to the outhouse), organizing the workmen into teams, mending equipment, taking preliminary notes, and cleaning up the old excavation areas. We have already set out some of the grid points for the new excavation areas, but after a year of weathering, we have plants, trash from a year’s worth of picnics on the mound, and backfill to remove from our old excavations. We probably won’t break new ground until Wednesday, but it still feels good to get started.
Tomorrow we will concentrate all our efforts on the Bronze Palace area and then shift workers and energies to the lower town on the following day. It is important to prepare the digging areas carefully. By the beginning of the next work week (that’s Saturday for us), we should be deep into the real archaeological deposits having cleared away the surface debris and plow zone.
I’ll post some photographs of our first morning at work so you can get a sense of what it is like. A few things are nearly certain: 4:30am will have a cool breeze, the sunrise should be spectacular, and there will be a buzz of anticipation in the air.
Part of life on the dig is the constant shifting of personnel as outside commitments and the complex schedules of academic life require early departures and late arrivals. Since we have to submit our permit requests in December for excavations starting seven or eight months later, it is inevitable that the plans we set up in winter require revision in the early summer.
One of our senior ceramicists, Valentina Vezzoli, recently returned to Europe to take up a new position as Charge de Recherches at FNRS (CReA-Patrimoine Universite Libre Bruxelles) in Belgium. Valentina brought her experience in medieval pottery from Apamea and Shayzar in Syria to Ziyaret Tepe and was able to finalize our pottery typology and set up the protocols for recording our medieval material. Although she was only here for a few weeks, Valentina got a tremendous amount of work done.
Marie and Valentina atop the high mound of ancient Amedi in Diyarbakir. We visited the site with its impressive view of the surrounding Tigris River valley and briefly examined a collection of medieval pottery from recent Turkish excavations there.
While she was here, Valentina also trained our newest ceramacist, Marie Jensen, a recent graduate from the University of Copenhagen in Near Eastern Archaeology. Marie is carrying on the work started by Valentina in recording the medieval ceramics from both the citadel mound and lower town excavations. And, of course, Marie is not working alone as both Chelsea and Hilary take time out from their other duties to help Marie with the copious medieval pottery.
We wish Valentina the best of luck in Bruxelles. She will be working with us during the “off season” to bring the final report of the medieval village at Ziyaret Tepe to publication, so we look forward to a long collaboration. You are missed here in the field!
As you know, we have been conducting electrical resistivity surveys on the high mound at the western edge of the Bronze Palace. In past seasons, we have used a different subsurface geophysical survey technique (magnetic gradiometry) on three separate occassions to try and map the citadel mound. The results have been poor, in part because the stratigraphy of the citadel mound is very complex. Each new occupational group at Ziyaret Tepe has disturbed the remains left by the previous occupants. In our case, the Medieval period villagers dug hundreds of pits into the citadel mound, storing grain and other commodities, and eventually filling the pits with their trash.
This season, I wanted to try a different technique on the citadel mound using electrical resistivity in the hopes that this technique, which in the past has provided us with more detailed maps than the magnetic surveys in the lower town, might provide interesting insight into the western half of the Bronze Palace.
Here are some of our early results from 2011.
Electrical resistivity survey on citadel mound, west of the Bronze Palace excavations.
Not exactly obvious to the untrained eye. In fact, it is not exactly obvious even to the trained eye what is going on here – this is a difficult dataset! The square represents a plan of a 20m by 20m grid, laid out with the grid point N1000 E1110 in the southwestern corner. Each box represents a measurement of resistance (in ohms) at a given point on the citadel mound. Each square (or pixel) is 50m by 50cm. In broad terms, the dark areas have a high resistance; the light areas have low resistance. The red squares are those with the highest resistance.
At Ziyaret Tepe, pits and mudbrick walls tend to retain moisture well, so they have less resistance to the passage of electricity. Remember water is a great conductor of electricity (which is why you don’t plug in your radio perched on the edge of the bathtub) so moisture content is an important part of our electrical resistivity maps. The soil inside and outside of the mudbrick walls tends, in general, to have slightly higher resistance, while compacted soils (like pathways and streets), cobbled surfaces, and large stones tend to have the highest resistance.
My interpretation of this map suggests that the Medieval pits have again badly damaged the underlying Assyrian walls, which should appear as linear light shaded features. There are hints of walls, but it is hard to point to a distinct plan. There are also vaguely circular features which may be the results of pits. All in all, it is a disappointing plan except for two single points, close together which gave extremely high resistance readings at the place where I have put the blue circles. The resistance here was not high enough to suggest a void or open space (such as a partially-filled well), but more like a very large stone, a coarse gravel fill, or a small, highly compacted surface. It is probably worth spending a few days digging here in order to identify the source of the anomalous readings.
This process, commonly used in the geophysical surveys, is called “ground-truthing”. If these places turn out to be interesting archaeological features, we can expand the area of our survey to find other, similar anomalies.
Digging starts on Tuesday, so perhaps we will know soon what these high resistance points represent.
I’ve been promising to introduce some of the staff. As you’ll see over the season, a successful project relies on individuals with diverse skills who are able to work together as a team. You will also notice that people lend a hand when work needs to be done, so everyone gets some experience with pottery analysis, digging, geophysical surveys, database management, and the dozens of other tasks that arise.
Willis Monroe is our registrar, which is a very key role. When he’s not here in Tepe, Willis is a PhD candidate at Brown University in the Department of Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies. He studies the ancient languages and cultures of the Ancient Near East, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite. His recent interests have been in Mesopotamian Astronomy and Late-Babylonian Scholarship. During high school he participated in a Rotary exchange program and spent a year in Ankara, which gave him the oppurtunity to learn Turkish and get to know the country. This is Willis’ fifth season at Ziyaret Tepe and it’s hard to imagine this place running well without him.
Willis at work (with friend) registering objects. He is numbering a "Hand of Ishtar", a hand-shaped baked clay piece used to decorate Late Assyrian public buildings. He will enter its measurements and a deteailed description into our centralized database.
The official job of the registrar is to carefully describe all of the artifacts found at the excavation. In the old days, this meant keeping paper registers or notecards on each artifact; today it means that Willis also maintains our intranet, centralized database, and computer laboratory. In effect, he keeps track of the thousands of artifacts that come through the dig house each season. Needless to say, he is busy.
Each day during the excavation, Willis catalogues all of the new artifacts, makes sure that they are cleaned and sent to the right specialist for study and coordinates with our photographer, Hilary, and our illustrator, Paola, to make sure that the appropriate photographs and drawings are made. Somehow he manages to do this cheerfully, even when he is supposed to run the computer lab without electricity!
With some expert troubleshooting from Brad Rice and Chris Martin in IT at the University of Akron, we seem to have overcome our connectivity problems with the blog! Thanks to both of you for your help. As usual, the UAkron IT department comes through.
