Ziyaret Tepe

Getting twenty-five team members from eight countries to arrive in the same place at the same time with all the equipment and supplies needed for a large expedition takes a lot of planning. After months of bureaucratic paperwork, buying tickets, arranging itineraries, and making contingency plans, the first of our team has arrived in the southeast. It was an absolute blistering day when Valentina arrived in Batman from Milan; the local temperature was reported at 54 degrees Celsius (= 129 degrees Fahrenheit) which is hot, even by our standards! By the time that Jordan, Azer, and I got to the Batman airport, the sun was down and the heat of the day dispersing.

There were the usual hiccups in our travel this year. Our local airport in Diyarbakir is closed for three months due to renovation, requiring us to reroute everyone through the much smaller Batman airport nearly 100km east of Diyarbakir by road. My luggage, including all of our geophysical survey equipment, didn’t arrive in the Istanbul airport from New York, having been sent to Rome instead. Thankfully, the airline was able to recover the bags and deliver them to me during a long 9 hour layover in Istanbul and, despite considerable shuffling of contents during multiple inspections, everything seems to be in place. Of course, all the contents of the checked bags are carefully inventoried beforehand so I can ensure that nothing has gone missing during transport. Archaeology is the art of making lists!

The big challenge this year in setting up our camp is that our traditional dig house, which I described last year in an earlier post, has been rented to another group. The place where we’ve stayed since 2002 is a government-owned compound and the new director rented the dig house to a group of workers from DSI, the organization building the Ilisu Dam that will flood the site. So, we are looking for a new home for the year. After 10 years of comfortable living in a well known location, this will be a season of change.

As you can imagine, it is not easy to find a compound with living and working facilities for 25 people in the small village of Tepe. At the moment, we are coordinating with the Diyarbakir Museum director, Nevin Soyukaya, and local officials to secure access to a large school building in Tepe which is currently vacant since school is out for the summer. Our driver and cook, Mehmet and Necmi, have been scouring the village of Tepe and nearby villages for other possible working places, but we are short on good options right now.

So, as the team assembles over the next few days, our top priority is to find a dighouse, fix it up, move in our belongings from the depot, and get the camp in working order. Normally we can do this in just one day… but this so far this does not appear to be a normal season. Part of the challenge, and I suppose one might even say the fun, of field archaeology is conquering the unexpected, whether it is an unexpected ancient find, or the need to change logistical gears suddenly. Keep your fingers crossed that the school house is suitable and available for our team this year. We hope to be digging by Saturday.

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.

Kemalettin has closed down Operation T for the season. It was a very interesting excavation area although, contrary to our expectations, we did not find the Assyrian street system and private houses we were seeking. Rather, Kemalettin was able to document two layers of what we believe are Late Roman houses with stone foundations. The upper parts of the walls, which were not preserved, were almost certainly made of mudbrick.

There were quite a few items found on the floors, including an interesting collection of ceramics that will form an important part of our publication of the 2012 season. We also found a set of iron keys and other metal objects that await conservation and further study.

This bowl, from the floor of the northern room of the Operation T house, was found with a layer of burnt (carbonized) seeds burnt at the bottom — perhaps the remains of someone’s meal. We have requested permission to export the seeds so that we can run radiocarbon dates on them and determine at least a rough range of dates for the final use of the building. Other pottery was more damaged and will have to await Hayley’s arrival next year before we can restore and record the rest of this in situ Roman pottery collection.

We also had a surprising number of coins this year. Here are photographs of three more coins, all copper/bronze and very well preserved. The coins will be sent to the Diyarbakir Museum for additional study and eventual display. The center coin, we think, is from the time of Flavius Arcadium Augustus, when he was Emperor of the East, c. AD 395-401. The reverse of the coin, seen here, shows the emperor standing holding a scepter and shield with victory standing to his left crowning him and holding a palm branch. The coin on the right is possibly Constantine II from the mid-4th century AD.

We already knew that the Romans were active in this region in the 4th century AD, when the famous black basalt city walls of Diyarbakir were strengthened, so it is hardly surprising to find occupation of the Late Roman period at Ziyaret Tepe. There are also a number of sites documented from that era in the Upper Tigris River valley. What surprised us was that the Ziyaret Tepe houses were not clear on the geophysical maps we made in previous seasons, nor was there a great abundance of Roman pottery on the surface. I guess that is what makes field archaeology so enjoyable — surprises await us at every turn. Operation T will help us fill in a gap in our overall chronology, but we will have to search elsewhere next year for our elusive Assyrian private houses.

You may have gotten the impression that at Ziyaret Tepe, it’s all work and no play. Well, we do work very hard. We start work just after sunrise, and work throughout the morning with a brief breakfast break. There is a siesta after lunch for a few hours, before returning to work at 4:30 after tea until the official end of the workday at 7pm. That’s a ten working hours at a minimum each day. We work six days a week, so our average work week is 60 hours. Some of us add considerably to that total by working through the siesta, in the late evenings, and on Fridays.

We do, however, enjoy some time to relax. At 7pm each evening, we gather before dinner for our official “happy hour” to enjoy a cold beer, some fresh hazelnuts, almonds, and other treats for which Turkey is famous, and to wind down from the days’ work and savor a brief respite from the heat.

After dinner, most of the team will spend some time sitting beneath our party lights (seen in the photograph above) in front of one of the houses, lounging in the hammock, chatting and rehashing the day’s events. An occassional backgammon, okey, chess or poker game has been known to break out in the somewhat cooler evening hours, but since the alarm rings at 4 or 4:30am, it’s typically early to bed.

On Fridays, we sometimes visit other sites for a brief tour and some time away from Tepe. A few weeks ago, we piled in the van for a trip to the spectacular medieval city of Hasankeyf carved out of cliffs on the Tigris just over 50km downstream from Ziyaret Tepe. We were treated to a presentation of some of the medieval pottery by the excavation team at the Hasankeyf dighouse, took a hike up the cliffs into the ruins of the 13th to 15th century city, and then cooled off at a fish restaurant overhanging the Tigris for lunch.

Last night, as a farewell party for Chelsea who left on the 4am flight this morning, we broke out a stash of marshmallows, chocolate bars and graham crackers after dinner, started up a bonfire, and made s’mores. For some of our European colleagues this was their first introduction to this most American of treats! We are grateful to an anonymous friend who donated the supplies from an American military base as marshmallows and graham crackers are not (yet) a staple in Diyarbakir.

The alarm clocks still rang at 4am, but Chelsea was already on her way home. Safe travels!