It’s hard to believe that it has been almost 10 months since that last post from poolside at the hotel in Diyarbakir. Everyone made it home safely back last September, if tired and a bit dusty. A few days after arriving back in Akron, my classes started and I began putting together the first of the paperwork for the 2013 season. It is a long process obtaining an excavation permit and funding, but we have assembled an excellent team again this year and an ambitious plan. Like I did in last year’s blog, I will introduce you our team members over the course of the season, catching them “in action” at the site.
The good news is that our permit has been approved by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism for our 16th season at Ziyaret Tepe! We are told that the Ilisu Dam salvage project is nearing an end and that once the lake is filled, there will be no more excavation permits so we have to make every season count.
For those of you who are new to this blog, there is background on the site in my earlier posts. Last year, we worked in three areas. On the high mound, Dirk Wicke continued his long-term excavation of an Assyrian palace, which we call the Bronze Palace, and one of the more important discoveries he made last season was a series of layers which possibly date to the very founding of the palace in the 9th century BC. We thought that the Bronze Palace should have been in use for over two centuries, but last year was the first time we were able to find hard evidence to demonstrate that the deeply buried foundations of the original building may, in fact, still exist in places. Dirk will be continuing his excavations on the high mound to explore these levels, and to answer some outstanding questions which I’ll post about later.
Two of our excavations last year in the lower town, Operations T and U headed by Kemalettin Koroglu and John MacGinnis, were in the southeastern part of the city. In Operation T, we were looking for private houses dating to the Assyrian period. In Operation U, we were expecting to find the remains of a large mudbrick structure which we had seen in earlier geophysical maps and which appeared to be a large building, perhaps an elite residence. As readers from last season know, we encountered a thick layer of Roman remains in both operations and only reached the lower, earlier Assyrian layers in Operation U. While the Roman occupation will make an interesting addition to our final reports, and is significant for our reconstruction of later periods in the region, they are not our primary research interest. As such, we are moving west of our 2012 excavation areas in the lower town.
One particularly interesting target are two rectangular buildings, probably made of mudbrick, each measuring about 18m by 7m (54 feet by 21 feet) in size placed side by side on the edge of large courtyard in the southern lower town. We have known about these buildings for many years, having discovered them by magnetic gradiometry survey, but we have never excavated them. John thinks they may be storerooms or possibly barracks associated with the Assyrian military. We plan to place at least one 10m by 10m excavation trench in these buildings to confirm that they are Assyrian and to see if we can determine their function. Geophysical survey gives us good groundplan in this case, but no indication of date or what materials are located in the building. This is a process we call “ground-truthing” to check the veracity of our geophysical maps. All of this assumes that the fields are not planted in irrigated cotton, and that we can secure permission from the local landowner’s to dig there. So stay tuned, this looks like an interesting spot to dig, so fingers are crossed we can access the area.
My flight leaves tomorrow in the early afternoon. I’m travelling with a UAkron undergraduate student, Jordan Bell, to whom I will introduce you very soon. There will be short delay in posts while we unpack, get camp set up, arrange for an internet connection, and the other thousand tasks that are necessary to prepare a workspace for 25 archaeologists for a month and a half. Check back in with us soon – we hope to be digging before too long.
