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A sprint to the finish.

Normally archaeology is like a marathon; slow and steady progress and lots of repetive tasks which require stamina and time. This season we have a goal to process 828 tomato crates full of pottery (the tomato crate is a standard measure of pottery in this part of the world, see photograph below). Every once in a while, however, you just feel like sprinting…

This morning four of our ceramicists took off in the car for the depot right after our morning tea at 5:30am, with scales, notebooks, and pens in hand to see if they could process all the pottery from two very large deposits in one morning. All before lunch! This is the ceramic equivalent of the 100m dash.

Marie, Raffaella, Azer, and Valentina at the start of a hard morning's work.
Marie, Raffaella, Azer, and Valentina at the start of a hard morning’s work.

Here’s the before picture showing Marie Jensen, Raffaella Pappalardo, Azer Keskin, and Valentina Vezzoli standing in front a pile of pottery, most dating to the Late Assyrian period (9th – 7th centuries BC). Each bag represents the pottery excavated during a single day from a specific locus (a locus is, in effect, a well-defined spatial unit representing perhaps a pit, floor, or oven). The tags tell us which loci are stored in which tomato crate (stored in numerical order in the depot). So all of the pottery in each bag can be placed back to its exact spatial coordinates on the site plans. This pottery was washed when excavated but otherwise needs to be categorized prior to analysis.

Our ceramics team spent the morning separating the sherds into ware types (just like modern pottery which comes in different wares – bone china, earthenware, etc., so ancient potters used different clays for different purposes), counting and weighing the sherds from each locus and recording details of decoration, vessel construction, and use. Likewise, the ceramicists will also record the “form” (our term for shape), since the form of the pottery determines both its function (for cooking, eating, drinking, storage, etc.) and also its date. Just like in the modern world, pottery styles change through time providing experts like Marie, Raffaella, Azer, and Valentina with evidence for when the pots were made.

Just before lunch, four very hot, dusty ceramicists returned from the depot having processed 17 tomato crates in under six hours. It was a great effort and satisifying for them to make such progress. By the way, they were all still smiling.

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Pretty unassuming, right?

One of our conservators, Yvonne Helmholz, has made a potential interesting discovery during the routine cleaning of an artifact destined for the study collection at the Diyarbakir Museum. The artifact is a flat bone plaque, roughly rectangular in shape. It is small, roughly 7.5cm by 5cm (3 inches by 2 inches) in size. Here is a picture of what it looked like when it came out of the ground.

Bone plaque ZT 13720 prior to conservation.
Bone plaque ZT 13720 prior to conservation.

Such objects are often used as decorative panels for wooden furniture such as chairs, tables, or beds. However, in this case, the bone appeared to be undecorated. Under the microscope, however, Yvonne discovered traces of very fine etching which may have the result of working the bone plaque into shape. More intriguing were minute traces of what looks like a very thin layer of metallic tin and a slightly thicker layer of gold on a few places. While we will need to undertake metallographic studies to confirm these initial observations, it seems not unlikely that this plain bone artifact may once have been covered in gold leaf. The tin, if that visual observation is confirmed by analysis, is more difficult to explain. Tin is often used as solder, but not with gold, so its function is unclear.

The plaque was discovered in Operation G in the lower town, in the corner room of wealthy residence. It was first discovered in 2003 and like so many artifacts that have been the subject of specialist analysis it has been waiting in line for final analysis. We are completing all of our field observations this year so there are certainly more interesting discoveries to come. After testing the metal residues, this interesting artifact is bound for the permanent study collections at the regional Diyarbakir Museum.

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Old tradition revisited in reconstructed Assyrian mosaic.

One of the more exciting elements of this year’s work is our collaboration with the regional Diyarbakır Archaeology Museum. There has been an archaeological museum in Diyarbakır since 1934 and the current building has been in use since 1985. The 1980’s building is now sadly in need of repairs and plans for opening a new cultural center, including a museum, in the old citadel (Iç kale) in Diyarbakır have been in the works for years and are nearing completion, so soon there will be a new home for all of the Ziyaret Tepe artifacts.

The new museum is in a spectacular old stone building on a high cliff overlooking the Tigris River at the edge of the city. The building has been restored as part of a complete refurbishment of the Iç kale. I’ll tell you more about that later.

Over the winter, Aytaç Coşkun, a craftsman working for the museum undertook a project to reconstruct a small portion of one of the large mosaic courtyards from the Assyrian public buildings excavated in the lower town. Here are some photographs of Courtyard 20 during excavation, a plan showing the location of three courtyards (2, 11, 20 on the plan), and a detailed photograph I sent to Mr. Coşkun, amongst other documentation.

OpGR Master Plan 20Aug2012 [Converted]

The original mosaics were made with stones selected from the Tigris River and for his reconstruction, Mr. Coşkun also hand-selected hundreds of river stones of various sizes sorted into black and white groups to imitate the original materials. These stones were placed in a cement mortar (the Assyrians used a mud mortar) in the entrance to one of the two galleries dedicated to Ziyaret Tepe in the new museum. You can see his team at work below.

At work on mosaic

Mr. Coşkun used a movable frame for constructing each square of the mosaic. He started by lining the edges with flat cobbles laid on edge, as seen in the original Assyrian design. Next, he selected appropriately sized and shaped colored stones to fill in the interior spaces, moving on to the next part of the frame when the mortar had set. Unlike the cut stone tesserae that were used by later Roman craftsmen, Assyrian mosaics employed natural stone shapes.

Finished mosaic

The result is quite impressive and will give museum visitors a real sense of what the mosaics would have looked like in ancient times. The Assyrian originals were over 10m (30 feet) on a side, so this is just a sampling. (The wire sticking out is for lighting a small pedestal that will sit on the center of the mosaic.) Well done, Mr. Coşkun!

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A new look.

Check out the new banner at the top of the page. This is a panaramic shot that Willis took of Bismil at night. One day shortly after we arrived in Turkey, six of us retired in the evening for some refreshments on the rooftop of the Hotel Dolay before dinner and were greeted by cool breezes and a full moon. For anyone who was in Bismil even a few years ago, you can see how the city has grown. The new census population is 111,000! The area is thriving with lots of new construction projects all over town in advance of the new Ilisu lake.

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We’re back – the 2014 Ziyaret Tepe study season begins.

Our last digging season ended in a whirlwind of activity and I’ve been meaning to go back and finish off the last 2013 blog entries for months… and here it is 2014 already! As I told you last season, the 2014 season will be our last in Turkey. We are not going to be excavating this season on the mound or lower town, but we are still anticipating lots of interesting discoveries. Our goal this season is to fully process and record previously excavated finds stored in our depot in preparation for the final publications. This is the unglamorous side of archaeology – long hours in the laboratories – but very rewarding work.

The first day of work. The garden of the Hotel Dolay in Bismil.
The first day of work. The garden of the Hotel Dolay in Bismil.

A small crew arrived in Diyarbakir on Monday night and met with the new museum director, Mehmet Eneze, and our museum representative, Leyla Ay. Today, we opened our depots and set up a temporary field camp. On Friday, we will move into the local school that has served for the past two years as our field camp, but in the meantime we have accomodations at a hotel in Bismil. The garden will be a comfortable spot for a few days and here you see Jane, Tina, Emily, Tim and Azer (Willis took the picture) hard at work. With such a short field season (our last day is August 15) there is no time to waste! Check back in for our latest discoveries in the coming days.