Category: Background Information

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Background Information Team members

Willis Monroe works as project registrar.

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!

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Background Information ZT Logbook

Surveying on the citadel mound.

One of the first things we do each year when we get to Ziyaret Tepe is to relocate our survey points on the site and to re-establish our “site grid”. An important thing to know about most archaeologists: we have obsessive interests in recording the precise location of all the ancient walls, pits, hearths, floors, and artifacts we find on our sites. In order to do this, we create detailed gridding systems which allow us to record the location of ancient features and artifacts in three dimensions. Conceptually, our site grid is a projection of north-south and east-west, lines that divide Ziyaret Tepe into 10m by 10m squares, to which we add a height above sea level.

In 1997, on the very first morning of work at the site, I drove a 1.5m long piece of iron rebar into the citadel mound at an arbitrary (and convenient) point and assigned this precise spot the coordinates N1000 E1000, meaning that it was 1000m north and 1000m east of an point well off site (called an “imaginary datum”). From an old Turkish state map, I determined the elevation at that point was 568.09m above sea level. All spatial measurements made subsequently over the past 15 years reference this initial survey point.

Tim surveying on the citadel mound. This photograph was taken in 2007, but it could be from any season as the annual ritual of establishing the site grid looks pretty much the same each year.

So, our typical excavation unit is a 10m by 10m grid square with each corner located at the intersection of two lines in our site grid. For example, N980 E1170 is the grid point 20m south and 170m east of that piece of iron rebar. We then record the precise location of important features or artifacts within these grid squares, again relative to the iron rebar. I can tell you, for example, that artifact ZT 29303 (an iron pin) was found at N989.28 E1173.63 elevation 568.38m (9.28m north and 3.63m east of the grid corner). I could, if I wanted, put the iron pin back in its original findspot within grid square N980 E1170.

I told you we were a bit obsessive.

Why do we do this? Part of the analysis of archaeological sites involves studying the spatial relationships between different artifacts, and between artifacts and their surrounding features. This detailed level of recording is necessary to allow us to reconstruct the site, either on paper or, increasingly, through CAD and other computer assisted modeling.

A few days ago, Chelsea and I went out and, using our total station and my notes from 1997, we relocated that same piece of iron rebar, still firmly in place at N1000 E1000, we established the north-south line, and started laying out survey and excavation points for this year’s work.

I’ll tell you about our first few days of survey in a subsequent post.

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Background Information

The Bronze Palace.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that we would be working in the Bronze Palace on the eastern edge of the high mound. This is the area marked Operation A/N on the topographic map I just posted. I thought it might be useful to give you a little background information on the palace since it will figure prominently in our posts.

First of all the name “Bronze Palace” is my invention, not the building’s ancient name. It is useful shorthand for referring to the building, and people tend to remember catchy names better. The Bronze Palace was used by the Assyrian rulers of Tushhan to house the central administration, conduct state business, and probably served as the residence of the governor. It is likely that the Assyrian king would have slept here when passing through Tushhan to conduct military campaigns along the northern frontier. Our current dating for the Bronze Palace is that it was in use during the 8th century BC.

Our excavations have uncovered only a small portion of the plan of the Bronze Palace, a large courtyard (Room 5) surrounded by a number of smaller rooms. The entire structure is made of mudbrick on a massive scale. Much of the palace was built upon a 2m (= 6 feet) thick platform of solid mudbrick, and in places the walls were decorated with polychrome wall paintings in black, blue, and red paint over white plaster. The paintings are now sadly in fragments, but they give us some sense of the grandeur of the palace in its heyday. Here is a plan of the building.

Room 7 was the throne room (often called the “reception room”) to the Palace. We know this because of parallels with other Assyrian palaces excavated elsewhere, and because of certain special features found here. I’ll tell you more about that later.

So, why the name “Bronze” Palace. Under the courtyard floor, which was paved with large flat baked bricks, we found evidence of at least five cremation burials, fired to a very high temperature, and containing (in addition to human remains) a large hoard of elite Assyrian artifacts made of metal, stone, ivory, and ceramics, including a very substantial collection of bronze artifacts: vessels, pitchers, lamps, furniture fittings. Since bronze was typically recycled in ancient times, it is rare to find such a large quantity of metal in one place, hence the nickname “Bronze Palace”.

Excavation of a sounding below the Bronze Palace to expose a drainage channel which carried water beneath the palace. The Bronze Palace had a well planned and sophisticated plumbing system.

 

A close-up view of the engraved handle of a bronze pitcher found in a cremation burial beneath the courtyard floor of the Bronze Palace. The artifacts found here were of the highest craftsmanship.

You’ll learn much more about the Bronze Palace (as will we!) as the excavations continue this summer. We will be working close to the throne room, and elsewhere in the palace, so stay tuned.

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Background Information

A topographic map of the site.

Archaeologists love maps. We spend a great deal of time and effort making maps of our excavation trenches, our sites, and the broader region in which we work. Below is one of the essentials of any project – a topographic map. In our first season at Ziyaret Tepe (1997), my colleague Guillermo Algaze and I made a map of the entire site using a total station and a hand-held compass. This map shows the changes in elevations across the site.

Topographic map showing the elevation contours, extent of the site (shaded), and the main areas of excavation (designated with a letter A-S).

The citadel mound is in the north-central part of the site, with the lower town extending to the west, east, and south. Our survey work in past years suggests that the city does not extend to the north and today the limit of the site is marked by a modern road. As you can see, despite over a decade of excavation, we have only exposed less the 2% of the ancient city of Tushhan.

I’ll refer back to this map from time to time so that you can orient our different excavation and geophysical projects across the ancient cityscape.

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Background Information ZT Logbook

Work starts in earnest with pottery from the Medieval period.

Hard to believe it is Monday already. We spent our first full day here on Friday getting supplies and equipment out of our depot – a large storage unit we rent on the outskirts of the village – and setting up the camp. I drove up to Diyarbakir and informed the regional museum that we had arrived and met with our official government representative, Ahmet, who works at the Diyarbakir Museum. In Turkish, his title is temsilci and Ahmet’s role in our project is to oversee our activities and make sure we follow all the rules, and to help us in local negotiations and with logistics while in the field. We pay his salary during the season and he will stay with us, sending periodic reports on our progress to the Museum. No work starts without a temsilci!

On Saturday, we got down to business. Much of the first two weeks of the project this year will be devoted to analysis of materials excavated in previous seasons. In our depots we have some 180,000 pottery sherds and other artifacts which form an important study collection and which will eventually all be processed and recorded in our on-line database. This doesn’t sound very exciting and, to be truthful, it is a very tedious and time-consuming task, but understanding pottery is the backbone of much archaeological interpretation. Two important facts: (1) pottery sherds are exceptionally durable and will survive quite happily underground for millennia and (2) pottery styles and fashions change through time so that each generation or era has its own distinctive pottery styles. Hence, we can use pottery (among other things) to help us date the various layers and features we find at our sites.

This season we have started with an important collection of Medieval pottery, some of which we can date stylistically to the 12th through 15th centuries AD because some of the forms are well known from other sites where it is found in good contexts. Medieval pottery in the region is striking because some of it has beautifully colored glazes in blues, greens, yellows, purples, and whites, that rival fine ceramics made today. The glazed pottery is pretty well studied, but what we don’t know much about are its more common, and less appealing counterparts, the unglazed pottery vessels. These are plain terracotta vessels used for cooking, eating, fetching water and other mundane daily tasks; the unglazed pottery is poorly documented in our region, in general. So we are investing a considerable amount of time right now making a detailed study of both the glazed and unglazed pottery vessels, where on the site they come from, and how they change through time to build up a solid sequence of Medieval craftsmanship when Ziyaret Tepe was a small village with perhaps a dozen or so houses between 500-800 years ago.

Eventually these results will be published and our colleagues will be able to take our work and expand on it using new excavations and surveys. While I doubt too many Medieval potsherds will make headlines, such basic science is the foundation upon which we start to learn about ancient societies. Sunday and Monday were also devoted to processing the Medieval sherds; we are already starting to see some interesting patterns develop, but there are many more wooden crates of material left to analyze before we can write the final chapter.

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Background Information Team members

The senior staff.

Here are some photographs of our senior staff, just so you can put faces to the names you’ll be reading about. You’ll get to know more about all of us and our research as the season continues.

  Timothy Matney from the University of Akron in Akron, Ohio (USA) is filling out sample tags. At Ziyaret Tepe everyone helps with the mundane tasks that keep the project running smoothly.
John MacGinnis is from the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England. Here he is examining a section cut through a main street leading into Tushhan through the southern gate (Operation Q.)
Dirk Wicke comes from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Mainz, Germany.
Kemalettin Koroglu, a Professor at Marmara University in Istanbul, Turkey, is drawing a section of the city’s fortification wall in Operation K.
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Background Information

How old is Ziyaret Tepe?

The earliest excavated levels at Ziyaret Tepe date back to the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, roughly 3000 BC. It’s possible that even earlier remains are buried at the bottom of the citadel mound, but it would be very difficult to get to them.

Most of our digging this year will concentrate on the Late Assyrian period, c. 882 -611 BC at our site. Here is a simple timeline from our website that shows the chronology of the Assyrians.

During this time, the city was called Tushhan and it served as a regional center of the Assyrian Empire. The imperial center was located in what is now modern day Iraq. The Assyrians, at the height of their political and military power, controlled a vast area from Egypt to Iran. Ziyaret Tepe, at the northern edges of the empire, served as a military strongpoint guarding the great Assyrian cities, such as Nineveh, to the south from invasion.

After the Assyrians abandoned the city in 611 BC, there were only sporadic occupations on the citadel mound. During the 13th and 14th centuries AD, there was a small farming village on the high mound. We expect to find some of the remains from this medieval occupation at the beginning of the season.

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Background Information

A general view of the site.

Here’s a photograph from 2007 that shows the citadel mound in the background. It’s 23 meters (= 70 feet) high and is made entirely of collapsed buildings accumulated over a period of 5,000 years.

In this case, we are excavating in the “lower town”. I thought this might give everyone a sense of the scale of the site. The excavation area is 20 meters by 10 meters (about 60 feet by 30 feet). The raised areas are the mudbrick walls in a small part of a temple treasury that we excavated from 2001 to 2010. The temple (which we have not located yet) was separate from the treasury and was dedicated to the goddess Ishtar.

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Background Information

What are we digging?

The Ziyaret Tepe Archaeological Expedition started in 1997 with a small team of three archaeologists conducting surface survey and topographic mapping. Now in our 15th season, our field crew typically comprises two dozen archaeologists and other specialists, as well as fifty or so local Turkish workers.

The Assyrian city of Tushhan was about 32 hectares (= 80 acres) at its largest extent and probably housed a population of about 5,000. A site this large can never be fully excavated, so we have to carefully select a few areas for intensive scientific excavation. Most summers we excavate in three or four different areas of the site at the same time, depending on our current research questions and personnel.

In 2011, we are digging in one area of the site that has long been part of our excavations, namely the “Bronze Palace” on the high citadel mound. We are also going to start two new areas of excavation, both in the low flat “lower town” that surrounds the citadel. The first of these is an area of Assyrian public housing, that is where we expect the common people lived. The second is a large structure whose function is not clear, but which may represent a wealthy Assyrian’s house or perhaps a small governmental building. I’ll tell you more later about how we know the location of these structures before we start digging!

This blog will follow all three excavation projects as they unfold…