Category: ZT Logbook

This photograph shows Willis Monroe and our driver, Mehmet Tekin, helping with a geophysical surveying on the citadel mound two days ago. We are, in effect, trying to find the western edge of the Bronze Palace before we start the excavations. Our efforts in previous seasons have been entirely concentrated on the eastern part of the building, so we need to expand our explorations.

As I mentioned earlier, the Bronze Palace was built, in part, on a thick platform of mudbricks which served as a strong foundation for the building. One clue we have about the location of the western edge of the palace is a steep slope about a meter high and approximately 80m (=240 feet) west of our current excavation area. Since the mudbrick platform should erode more slowly than other materials, it makes sense that this steep erosional escarpment might just be the edge of the platform for the palace.

To test this hypothesis, we are trying to map the ancient subsurface features, like the walls of the palace, using electrical resistivity. This is a geophysical survey technique in which we pass an electrical current underground between two probes. A second set of probes measures the grounds’s resistance to the flow of electricity. Buried walls affect how easily an electrical current flows underground between two points and, if we collect readings systematically along our site grid, we can map them and “see” features below ground without excavating.

The frame that Willis and Mehmet are inserting into the ground holds two of the probes and a long yellow wire connects to two distant probes, some 50m away. These probes create the electrical field and measure the subsurface effects. The box on top of the frame collects the measurements; we have sophisticated mapping software on our field laptop that allows us to convert the resistance readings into a map of subsurface features.

As you can see in the photograph, there is nothing visible on the ground to guide our excavations, so we rely on subsurface geophysics to help us choose the best places to dig.

For any UAkron students who might be reading this post, I will be teaching my Archaeogeophysical Survey course again in the Spring of 2012. It’s a fun class and you never know where it might lead you.

A few of you may have noticed that my last two blogs came up in pieces. In fact, it took many attempts across several hours to get the previous blog to load at all. This one is being sent from the town of Bismil about 25 minutes away from Tepe.

We are still having difficulties with our electrical supply. Turkey runs on a 240V system, but our regulator in the dig house is showing that we are only getting about 150-170V into the house. Some of the rooms in the compound effectively have no electricity and the power goes out completely about ten or so times a day. This appears to be a problem across the entire village, but it does make our technology-driven work more challenging.

We are also having difficulties with our wireless connectivity, which is intermittent at best. If you don’t hear from us for a few days, don’t despair, we will get updates to you as soon as possible. Field conditions are often a bit on the rough side, but we are still making good progress with the archaeology, despite the technical difficulties.

On the bright side, today’s survey data look really interesting; more to come soon on that subject!

My last post explained that we were studying the pottery of the Medieval period as a starting point for this year’s investigation. Here is a collection of photographs showing various elements of the process.

The vast majority of archaeological artifacts come out of the ground badly broken. The beautiful complete or restored museum objects we associate with ancient societies don’t really represent the sorts of materials most archaeologists study because finding complete museum-quality artifacts is rare.

Analyzing pottery relies on careful measurements, great patience, and on experience. What we are doing at our processing station at the Ziyaret Tepe dig house is very low tech. We have balance beam scales, hand-held magnifying glasses, paper forms, and a team of researchers with good eyes and a penchant for details.

Each bag of pottery sherds, which all come from the same well-defined place at the excavation (a “context” in archaeological jargon), is emptied onto a table and sorted first by its fabric. Pottery clay has distinctive colors, textures, and inclusions (fine material added to aid in firing the clay and for decorative purposes) such as sand, chaff, or mica. Since potters in different societies used different clay sources and additives, and had different types of kilns or firing techniques, we are able to distinguish between different pottery traditions and pinpoint the time and place of manufacture for many of the tens of thousands of potsherds we recover each year.

Having sorted the pottery into fabric types, each group of sherds is counted, weighed, and the information recorded on our paper forms for later data entry into our central database. We then divide the sherds by shape (or what we call “form”) which further allows us to discriminate between time periods and different potting practices. We have a master list of forms, built up over a decade of pottery analysis, which illustrates each of our pottery forms, and lists parallels we have found with other sites.

Of course we discover new fabrics, forms, and pottery combinations each season and these are carefully described and added to our descriptions. In this sense one is never “done” with pottery analysis.

What can we do with all this detailed knowledge? Well, when we start to excavate a new area, or a new site in the vicinity, or even when we just find potsherds on the surface of an ancient site 50km away, we are often able to say with some confidence during which periods the site was occupied or when a particular building was used.

As you can see, there is a lot to be learned from even the tiniest shred of evidence!

We arrived tired but with luggage intact at the Diyarbakir airport just before midnight on Thursday night. Chelsea and I joined two of our team members, Valentina and Hilary, in the Istanbul airport after a somewhat mad dash through from the customs hall to the domestic terminal.

We were met at the airport in the regional capital by our long-term driver, Mehmet, and two of our team who had arrived earlier via bus from Ankara, Willis and Hayley. If one has the time, the bus is really the way to travel in Turkey. The bus system is cheap, the buses are comfortable (i.e., air-conditioned), and the scenery is spectacular as one goes east from Istanbul and the coast, across the high plateau and into the rugged mountains of the east. Flying is a lot quicker! We had a short wait for one more of our crew, Paola, before driving through the dark down the familiar road to our field camp in the village of Tepe.

The field camp is a series of three buildings owned by the Ministry of Agriculture. We rent all three buildings (but not the grain storage silos) for the two months or so that we are in the field. Below is a picture of one of the buildings. By archaeological standards, this is a luxury accomodation: running water, indoor toilets (although with a manual flush system) and electricity. Well, at least some of the time. In fact, this morning the electricity went out. This is not an unusual occurence, but normally it is out for just a few hours, often less than an hour. Today, however, it stayed off for 11 hours. We had our internet set up and running this morning, and I was eager to check the blog when all the power went out. Such is village life in southeastern Turkey. The entire village was out of electricity as work was done at a local power station, we’re told.

The village has an official population of around 10,000, but it seems unlikely to me that this is accurate; I would estimate maybe 3,000. There is a single main street with houses set behind either side for a few blocks. There is a lot of new construction in the village this year, a new hospital being built with European funding, and a whole row of old shops along the main street had been demolished and new buildings were already rising in their place. I’m told that the price of cotton is high this year (well over 300% of last year’s price) and the village appears to be prospering.

Well, the electricity just went out again. I have about three or four minutes to post this on battery power before we lose the internet again, so I’ll sign off for the night. The pictures will have to wait until we have electricity again. I’ll update you on our work tomorrow and introduce some of the team.

Chelsea and I have made it through the first leg of our journey. We checked into the Cleveland airport with over 200 pounds of luggage, mostly equipment and supplies with a few clothes used as packing material around the computers, total station, electrical restivity meter, etc. Needless to say, archaeologists present a rather unusual challenge for TSA and the airlines. We found out the hard way that a stripped-down frame for an RM15 resitivity setup is NOT allowed as carry-on by TSA. They were unimpressed with my detailed explanation of its use and value. It was a bit of a mad dash back through security to check the frame and get to our gate.

I suppose I should introduce Chelsea Jalbrzikowski. She is a former UAkron undergraduate, now enrolled as a graduate student in Forensic and Biological Anthropology at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pennsylvania. This is Chelsea’s third season with us and is coming out to collect information for her M.A. thesis, studying a collection of Assyrian skeletons, including some very unusual cremation burials found buried under the courtyard pavement of the Bronze Palace. Chelsea also has learned a lot (perhaps more than she wants) about Assyrian pottery and completed a geophysical survey for us in 2009. One of the characteristics of a good field archaeologist is versatility; it’s important to be able to take on whatever tasks need doing.

We have a few hours more in Chicago, then it’s on to Istanbul. We are meeting up with more of the crew in Diyarbakir tomorrow night, but I’ll wait to introduce them.

Hard to believe that it is almost time to leave for Turkey. Ten months of preparation: permit applications, fundraising, recruiting personnel, planning the excavation areas, purchasing equipment and supplies, database management, endless lists, and now we are off. It takes a great deal of logistics to get nearly 30 people from nine countries to all show up in the right place at the right time, and with all the supplies we need for two months of work, but the effort is sure worth it when we get down to work!

On Thursday night, the first wave of archaeologists will arrive in Diyarbakir Airport, to be met by our driver, Mehmet, for a happy reunion. We’ll drive down to Tepe, about an hour to the southeast, and work begins in earnest on Friday. Hopefully we will be able to get our internet connection at the dig house set up quickly, so we can keep the blog updated. If everything goes according to plan, we will open up our sealed depots where the artifacts that are still awaiting analysis from previous seasons are stored, and get to work on Saturday. Inshallah! We are only in the field for two months, so every workday counts. We work six days a week, with Friday off, but this Friday is going to be non-stop work as we set up our dighouse and the laboratories. Each year we put all of our equipment in storage since we only rent our dighouse for the time we are in Turkey, so each season starts with housekeeping.

But first, we have two days of travel ahead.