Ziyaret Tepe

In our search for Assyrian domestic houses in the lower town, we once again appear thwarted, this time by the presence of a very large Late Assyrian building. Today, Kemalletin uncovered the top of a 2m (6 ft) thick mudbrick wall in Operation M where we had hoped to find the modest dwellings of commoners.

Digging at a depth of just under 1m (3ft), Kemalettin recovered the first faint traces of mudbricks: two walls forming a corner at the northern edge of the trench. Adjoining the 2m thick wall is a perpendicular wall, perhaps about 80cm thick. At first glance, it seems possible that the thicker wall is an exterior wall for a large building, while the smaller wall may be an internal or partition wall, but at this point this is largely conjecture.

Importantly, we also found no evidence (or failed to find evidence) of the Romans, whose remains in the western lower town in 2011 foiled our search for Assyrian private houses in an area where geophysical survey was very suggestive. Kemalettin’s area in Operation M this year has a few pits cut into it, but no significant occupational levels above the Late Assyrian building.

We are dating the walls on the basis of the associated pottery, but according to our earlier work in Operation M, the floors should be located about 50cm (1.5 ft) below where we are excavating now so even this dating must remain tentative. By mid-week, we should be down to a primary Late Assyrian floor and hopefully the artifacts found on the floor will provide some clues as to the function of this large building in Operation M. We should know a lot more in a few days.

I keep posting about Operations M, N, V, and W so I figured I should show you a map and a picture to orient you to their locations.

During the 2004 excavation season in the lower town (Operation G), we recovered a beautiful pebble mosaic pavement in a large Assyrian building which we think belonged to the treasury of a temple dedicated to the goddess Ishtar, based on a cache of cuneiform tablets found there. The mosaic comprised alternating squares of black and white river pebbles from the Tigris, each square contained dozens of small stone set edgewise in a mud mortar.

Into this courtyard mosaic, a number of features were set which disturbed the checkerboard pattern. These included four baked bricks set in a rectangular arrangement which was probably a stable place for a heavy bench or some other piece of furniture. There were also a few places where the small neatly laid black and white river pebbles had been dug up and replaced with much larger stones.

We hypothesized that some of these disturbances might be graves dug into the courtyard while the building was still in use. In two other areas of the site, in the Bronze Palace and in the Operation Q gate, we also found burials beneath the floors of public buildings, so it seems probable that some of these disturbances were burials.

In 2004, we did not have permission to disturb the mosaics, but this year we requested and received a government permit to test our hypothesis in Courtyard 11. Now, all this large building had been backfilled after our excavations in 2004, so after surveying this year, we set a small team of men to remove the backfilled earth down to the mosaic pavement. It was easy to find since we had covered the pavement in a thick plastic sheeting to protect it from the modern agriculture.

Here is what the stone feature looks like in 2012, immediately prior to excavation. John will start work today by removing the large stones and shoring up the pebble mosaic at the edges of the possible grave. I will let you know what he finds. It should be clear pretty quickly if this area was a grave, or served some other, yet unknown, purpose.

This morning we started the first of two new initiatives for the 2012 field season. The first is an electrical resistivity survey in the western lower town. Back in 2002, we conducted a magnetic gradiometry survey in this area, measuring small fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field caused by subsurface architecture. In the western lower town, I was able to map what looked to be a large nearly square compound, possibly with open courtyards surrounded by single rows of mudbrick rooms. The building seemed to be set against the city’s fortification wall at point where the wall zig-zagged as it turned from the southern edge to the western edge of the site.

We’ve speculated for years that this might be the location of an Assyrian military emplacement, or “fort” as they are sometimes called, paralled in other Assyrian cities. This year, we are conducting a new, more detailed, geophysical survey with two goals in mind. First, we want to see if we can confirm and add details to our geophysical map of the area. Second, we hope to identify a promising area for excavation in our final digging season at Ziyaret Tepe in 2013.

The survey data are being collected by a University of Akron anthropology major, Jordan Bell, who recently completed my Archaeogeophysical Survey course at the University of Akron, and Charlie Draper, a recent Cambridge University graduate. Charlie will be starting his M.Phil at Oxford University in the fall with a prestigious Ertegun Scholarship for the Humanities. This is the inaugural year for the Ertegun Scholarships, so it is quite an achievement for Charlie to win this competitive award.

The electrical resistivity survey, as you might recall from last year’s blog, creates a subsurface electrical field and measures the amount of resistance to the passage of an electrical current at points along a grid. In our case, mudbrick walls tend to retain moisture better than the surrounding soil, so they appear as linear low-resistance features. Our biggest challenge is in overcoming the problem that the topsoil has no moisture so we have to add water in order to overcome the problem of contact resistance. This means each probe hole must be predrilled, filled with water, and allowed to soak for a few minutes before we can use the mobile resistance meter shown in the picture. This process adds greatly to the efforts required to collect good data.

I’ll post the results as they are ready.

The second new initiative is the excavation of a possible Late Assyrian burial in Operation W. Excavation on this grave starts tomorrow morning. I’ll fill you in on the details in a subsequent post.

Early each morning in Operation M, where we are looking for Assyrian domestic residences, Kemalettin’s workmen collect straw from the surrounding fields and start fires like the one below. As you know, the Turkish summer is hot so the fires are not for heat, but rather for making smoke. One of the biggest changes to the region that I’ve experienced over the past 15 years has been a dramatic rise in the mosquito population due to the arrival of irrigated cotton fields. Just before daybreak, the workers in the lower town face hordes of mosquitoes which quickly disappear after the sun is up (along with the bats that feed on them). It is pretty unpleasant for about an hour and the smoke from the fires helps keep the mosquitoes away, and makes for some dramatic photo opportunities.

Kemalettin also took this photograph of his team working early one morning. Unlike the Hollywood portrayals of Near Eastern excavations, archaeological digging is a slow, methodical task. The row of workers in Operation M are using small picks and trowels to flatten an area of soil so Kemalettin and his assistants can look for the subtle traces that mark ancient pits, floors, and mudbrick walls. Every surface in the trench has to be kept very clean. We’ve found that having the workers dig in a line avoids the problem of them digging too deeply in one place. If you look about halfway up the citadel mound in the background, you can just make out the pall of smoke that is hanging in the air from the worker’s fire.

Work in Operation M is proceeding very nicely. We are about 40cm (16 inches) down across an area of 10m by 5m (30 feet by 15 feet) and, according to our previous excavations nearby, we expect to hit the tops of the Assyrian walls in the next 10 or 15cm (4 to 6 inches), so Kemalettin is proceeding cautiously. The mudbrick walls are difficult to see and easy to dig through, so it takes experience, as well as a clean excavation area, to successfully find the ancient architecture.

By the early part of next week, we should be digging in the Assyrian levels in Operation M!

The first week of an excavation is usually the slowest one in terms of finds. Laying out excavations squares, clearing off the topsoil, and training the workmen how to dig carefully and methodically consumes a large amount of our time in these early days.

We have already found a few interesting artifacts in the northern sector of the Bronze Palace, although their contexts (that is, where they came from) were badly disturbed. To start, Dirk found two bronze fibulae. These are pins used to fasten cloaks or other garments that are of particular interest to us because we can date them stylistically. Like many objects that people use on a daily basis, certain shapes and decorative styles came in and out of fashion on a regular basis. Over the years, we have studied fibulae and can roughly tell in which century they were made based on the details of their design. Of course, when a bronze fibula comes out of the ground, the details are obscured by corrosion, dirt, and breakage. After conservation, the fibulae should provide us with some useful information. Dirk also found a bronze coin, shown here as it came out of the ground. After Lourdes is done with cleaning and conservation, we hope to be able to make an identification. I’ll upload a post-cleaning photograph in a few days. A carved ring, perhaps made out of ivory, decorated with a circular motif was discovered this morning from near the surface in the Bronze Palace.

Down in the lower town, in Operation V, where we hoped to find the barracks, John’s team immediately came across a pebble mosaic floor in the corner of the building on the second day of digging. This is both good and bad news. Good because it confirms the plan discovered via electrical resistivity shown in an earlier post. Bad because the floor is so close to the surface that it is unlikely that many of the contents of the room will have survived intact. We can always hope, but as you can see in the photo below, the mosaic floor shown as it was emerging from the earth is quite close to the modern surface. We should, however, be able to map a large area of the building and perhaps improve significantly on the geophysical plan from 2004.

I just wanted to post a quick photograph of the schoolhouse that is serving as the headquarters for the team this year. As you can see, it is an enormous structure. We are using just a fraction of the total space. It is a relatively new building and in good repair. The bright red color makes it a distinctive landmark along the road from Tepe to Bismil.

Two pieces of good news. After two solid days of very complicated negotiations with a variety of local authorities ranging from the town mayor of Tepe to the local school masters and the kaymakam of Bismil, we finally managed to secure accomodations for the season. Our first choice, our old dighouse of ten years standing, was not an option as it was already rented. Our second and third choices, two schoolhouses in the village of Tepe next to the ancient site, were also not available for various reasons that emerged over long discussions. We also looked at a few large private houses in Tepe but in the end none were suitable: either in size or by the fact that they were still under construction! In the end, the Museum helped us gain access to a somewhat new schoolhouse on the near edge of the closest large town to Tepe, a place called Bismil, population 56000. The town has grown remarkably over the past decade and a half and, in fact, the location where we are calling home now was an independent village called Kooperatif just a few years ago but is now a suburb. We are about 15km from Tepe, adding significant time to our commute to the site, but this was clearly the best option available.

The dighouse is a residential school so it is set up to handle a few hundred students and their needs. We have no shortage of bathrooms, bunk beds, or space for laboratories. As the pictures will show, the building is in excellent repair and boasts some important features, like a steady electrical supply, plenty of water, and an internet connection. For those of you who followed last year’s blog, these were occassional sources of inconvenience for us during the 2011 campaign. (I’ll post the pictures separately as they are taking a long time to upload.) Of course, we miss our small village setting and the chance to wander into the village after dinner to visit the internet cafe, or drink tea with our workmen. Sitting out on the veranda in the evening in Bismil we can hear the traffic from the nearby highway and there’s not much charm to the place. Still, it is a good functional workspace and everyone is eager to get started.

We moved in on Tuesday night with nothing but our suitcases. On Wednesday, we rented a large truck (kamyon) about half the size of a semi in the US, and filled it twice bringing all of the equipment to Bismil. All of Wednesday and most of Thursday were dedicated to cleaning, repairing, setting up workstations, the library, putting up shelves, inventorying equipment, and making lists for shopping. This place was a hive of activity and the newcomers got a good introduction to all that is involved in setting up an expedition camp. Today (Friday), we went to Diyarbakir and picked up our government representative (temsilci), Murat bey, from the Diyarbakir Museum, who will serve as our official connection to Ankara and the Ministry of Culture. We also gave a list of our workmen to our accountant so that he could complete the necessary paperwork so we can start digging tomorrow. Another round of shopping and it was home to a cold beer, dinner, and an early bedtime. Tomorrow the real work begins when we meet the workmen at 4:30am to start clearing away the debris that has accumulated in our excavation areas since last September and to lay out the new excavation units.

In the first post of the 2012 season, I mentioned that we hope to be excavating a pair of large buildings that we first discovered using geophysical survey methods a number of seasons ago. I wanted to show you what the map of the buildings looks like so you get some idea of what kind of data drive our decision to dig in a given place.

This photograph shows the ground at the place where we expect to find the building. As you can see, it is basically flat and featureless farmland. Although there are copious broken potsherds and the occassional broken stone artifact on the surface that have survived three thousand years of weathering and plowing, there are no features that would give us a clue as to the buildings below ground.

Circled on this map is the same area viewed via shallow subsurface geophysical surveying. The specific technique we used was electrical resistivity survey. Using a handheld mobile frame and set of electrical probes inserted into the ground, we created a subsurface electrical field and measured the resistance of the earth immediately below ground to the passage of an electrical current. In this map, the white lines represent areas of low resistance caused by the retention of moisture in the mudbricks that were used to make the large walls of the Late Assyrian buildings.

The general orientation and shape of the buildings is very clear, but the electrical resistivity survey does not tell us the date or function of this architecture. The surface pottery is all Late Assyrian and our experience with digging in other areas strongly argues that these buildings date from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC. Based on analogies from other Assyrian sites and the location of the architecture relative to the city fortifications and gate, we have hypothesized that these may be storage rooms, often called “magazines” in the professional literature, or possibly barracks associated with the Assyrian army, which we know came periodically to ancient Tushhan (the Assyrian name of Ziyaret Tepe) while conducting campaigns north of the Tigris River.

It looks like we will be starting work here in just a few days.