Ziyaret Tepe

Work on the citadel mound is proceeding well. Dirk has opened up two new areas of excavation: one on the northern edge of the Bronze Palace and one encompassing the area of the two electrical resistivity anomalies I mentioned in an earlier post.

In the northern grid squares, we were fortunate to find only a few later disturbances (e.g., pits) in the Bronze Palace. The Assyrian levels are immediately below the surface and, in fact, it appears that the floors of the rooms at this point have been truncated by modern erosion. Dirk is an expert at tracing the lines of mudbrick walls or wall foundations, even in such shallow deposits, so we should be able to recover the plan of the northernmost rooms of the palace.

We were also fortunate to find a well preserved Late Assyrian burial, with grave goods, immediately below the surface. The body was originally buried in a pit beneath the floor of the palace. Although the floor that sealed the burial is gone, we were able to discern the edges of the inhumation pit. The photo below shows Chelsea in the process of excavating the body. There is a complete  pottery vessel (with only one piece broken off), as well as a metal pin or fibula at the hip, presumably pinned to the garments used in the burial but long since decayed.

In the photograph above, the skull is to the left of the pottery vessel. You can just make out the eye socket at the ground level. The top of the skull is broken. Chelsea is cleaning the long bones of the arm. By late this morning, she had cleared the pelvis, arms, and most of the upper torso. It appears that the legs, however, are missing, having been taken away in the medieval period during the construction of a tannur, or bread oven, which is just to the left of this photograph.

Once Chelsea is done cleaning the bones, the skeleton will be drawn and photographed in place, then the bones will be removed to our human osteology laboratory at the dig house for detailed description and analysis. From human remains we can often determine basic characteristics, such as sex, age, and stature, as well as documenting various pathologies such as diseases, traumas, and the overall health of the individual. Chelsea’s report on the burial will become part of the preliminary and final publications of the project’s activities.

The excavations in the lower town in Operation T have almost finished clearing off the plow zone, although the bottom of the scars left by the plows are still visible as long parallel furrows in the excavation area. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we expected to find Late Assyrian architecture close to the surface. To our surprise, however, we have started to recover artifacts dating to the Roman period, including rooftiles and a very distinctive Roman pottery type previously not documented at Ziyaret Tepe.

The top right hand corner of this photograph shows the roof of our current dig house which has, as you can see, a tile roof using baked clay as a building technology which is nearly 2000 years old in this region (although the most common form of roof is a flat compressed mud roof laid over wooden beams and reeds). The top left corner is a fragmentary roof tile we found at Ziyaret Tepe in 2003 in Operation J in the western lower town. Below left are a few of the fragments that have been recovered in the past few days in Operation T. The shape of the tiles is very distinctive. Below right is a piece of fine ceramic ware, just the rim and part of the body of a vessel, that is very likely to be of Roman date.

Does this mean that there is a Roman house in the lower town in Operation T? Not necessarily. We know from elsewhere at Ziyaret Tepe that Roman roof tiles were sometimes re-used for later buildings.

That said, this morning Kemalettin showed me some stone wall foundations that may be associated with the rooftiles. We’ll need a few more days of digging to get to the bottom of this deposit. What does seem certain is that this part of the lower town was inhabited or used, perhaps only briefly, after the end of the Assyrian period in 610 BC.

On Friday, the village of Tepe was enveloped in a great dust cloud which dropped visibility down to less than 200m (we couldn’t see the Tigris River from the citadel mound or the village from the dig house) and trapped in the heat, which rose to 48 degrees Celcius (118 degrees Fahrenheit). The nights, usually considerably cooler in late July, remained uncomfortably hot. Usually dust storms blow in with a great wind and are gone within half a day, but this unwelcome visitor stayed with us through Saturday night.

Sunday morning came with welcome relief, the skies had cleared and temperature dropped considerably. We cleaned off the layer of brown dust that had blanketed everything in the camp and life got back to normal.

We then had some welcome visitors on Sunday morning; a rare treat in Diyarbakir province. Professor David Schloen from the University of Chicago and team of archaeologists and specialists working with him stopped by during a long weekend trip from their excavations at the Iron Age site of Zincirli, ancient Sam’al, some 360km west of Ziyaret Tepe. They toured the mound and our current excavations and came down to the dig house to meet our staff and see some of the recent finds. You can find out more about the Neubauer Expedition to Zincirli at their website, including more details on the discovery of the inscribed stelae of Katumuwa in 2008, which many of you read about in the New York Times.

Excavations in the Lower Town started in Operation T yesterday, despite a heat wave that sent temperatures climbing past 45 degrees Celcius (that’s 113 degrees Fahrenheit).

Operation T is where we expect to find the remains of private houses dating the Assyrian period. The operation is located in the southern part of the site, not too far from the line of the fortification wall that once ringed the ancient city.

We first became interested in this area when our magnetic gradiometry surveys of 1999 revealed a series of long, parallel linear features which we interpreted as the street system of Assyrian Tushhan. We briefly excavated a small test trench, Operation M, in 2004 across one of the linear features, confirming our basic assumption that these were streets lined with domestic structures.

Although the recovery of private houses was one of our long-term goals, it wasn’t until this year, with the completion of two major areas of excavation in 2010, that we had the resources to devote to a larger pilot project excavating the private houses in the southern lower town.

As you can see in the photograph above, the fields here (recently burned) are pretty featureless. You can see the scars made by agricultural plowing, but the archaeology is buried under an otherwise flat, uniform surface. We have already conducted some electrical resistivity survey (maps to come!), selected an area for excavation, and started to remove the topsoil. The modern plows tend to destroy the top 30-35cm of the archaeological deposits, but we expect to find the Assyrian houses immediately beneath this layer of plowzone.

The digging crew started to arrive a few days ago and we start the excavations tomorrow, so all the months of planning are finally at an end.

Dirk Wicke from Mainz University and three of his students, Judith Dosch, Fabian Heubel, and Sarah Reisel, as well as an archaeology student from Britain, David Astbury, have arrived. Our senior Turkish colleague, Kemalettin Koroglu from Marmara University is also here now, having driven across the country from Istanbul to join the team. We have three more excavators still to arrive, but the digging is soon underway with 35 local workmen meeting us at the site at 4:30am tomorrow.

Much of the day will be spent getting the equipment out of our depot, setting up the field camp (everything from tents to the outhouse), organizing the workmen into teams, mending equipment, taking preliminary notes, and cleaning up the old excavation areas. We have already set out some of the grid points for the new excavation areas, but after a year of weathering, we have plants, trash from a year’s worth of picnics on the mound, and backfill to remove from our old excavations. We probably won’t break new ground until Wednesday, but it still feels good to get started.

Tomorrow we will concentrate all our efforts on the Bronze Palace area and then shift workers and energies to the lower town on the following day. It is important to prepare the digging areas carefully. By the beginning of the next work week (that’s Saturday for us), we should be deep into the real archaeological deposits having cleared away the surface debris and plow zone.

I’ll post some photographs of our first morning at work so you can get a sense of what it is like. A few things are nearly certain: 4:30am will have a cool breeze, the sunrise should be spectacular, and there will be a buzz of anticipation in the air.

As you know, we have been conducting electrical resistivity surveys on the high mound at the western edge of the Bronze Palace. In past seasons, we have used a different subsurface geophysical survey technique (magnetic gradiometry) on three separate occassions to try and map the citadel mound. The results have been poor, in part because the stratigraphy of the citadel mound is very complex. Each new occupational group at Ziyaret Tepe has disturbed the remains left by the previous occupants. In our case, the Medieval period villagers dug hundreds of pits into the citadel mound, storing grain and other commodities, and eventually filling the pits with their trash.

This season, I wanted to try a different technique on the citadel mound using electrical resistivity in the hopes that this technique, which in the past has provided us with more detailed maps than the magnetic surveys in the lower town, might provide interesting insight into the western half of the Bronze Palace.

Here are some of our early results from 2011.

Not exactly obvious to the untrained eye. In fact, it is not exactly obvious even to the trained eye what is going on here – this is a difficult dataset! The square represents a plan of a 20m by 20m grid, laid out with the grid point N1000 E1110 in the southwestern corner. Each box represents a measurement of resistance (in ohms) at a given point on the citadel mound. Each square (or pixel) is 50m by 50cm. In broad terms, the dark areas have a high resistance; the light areas have low resistance. The red squares are those with the highest resistance.

At Ziyaret Tepe, pits and mudbrick walls tend to retain moisture well, so they have less resistance to the passage of electricity. Remember water is a great conductor of electricity (which is why you don’t plug in your radio perched on the edge of the bathtub) so moisture content is an important part of our electrical resistivity maps. The soil inside and outside of the mudbrick walls tends, in general, to have slightly higher resistance, while compacted soils (like pathways and streets), cobbled surfaces, and large stones tend to have the highest resistance.

My interpretation of this map suggests that the Medieval pits have again badly damaged the underlying Assyrian walls, which should appear as linear light shaded features. There are hints of walls, but it is hard to point to a distinct plan. There are also vaguely circular features which may be the results of pits. All in all, it is a disappointing plan except for two single points, close together which gave extremely high resistance readings at the place where I have put the blue circles. The resistance here was not high enough to suggest a void or open space (such as a partially-filled well), but more like a very large stone, a coarse gravel fill, or a small, highly compacted surface. It is probably worth spending a few days digging here in order to identify the source of the anomalous readings.

This process, commonly used in the geophysical surveys, is called “ground-truthing”. If these places turn out to be interesting archaeological features, we can expand the area of our survey to find other, similar anomalies.

Digging starts on Tuesday, so perhaps we will know soon what these high resistance points represent.