Lego Göbekli Tepe

This brilliant model of the ancient neolithic shrine at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey is by someone named Carl. Nice work, Carl! Via Archaeosoup productions (Twitter / Facebook).

Today's battle cry: Occupy Archaeology... with LEGO!!!!!!!

A jug of beer, a glass of wine, and trowels

One charming thing about Turkey is that so many alcoholic beverages are named after archaeological sites. About 90% of the beer sold in this country is Efes Pilsen, which is both refreshing and named after the ancient city of Ephesos. They also sponsor some archaeological work, for instance at the great Hellenistic city of Assos.


This sign is first thing you see when you pass the ticket gate: Assos ruins, brought to you by Efes Pilsen! Yeah. Some bright bulb in the Ministry of Culture and Tourism decided that all of Turkey's archaeological sites should have signs like this: an oversized rusty diamond with a notch. The design doesn't look good anywhere, I promise you, though this one with the multiple beer logos is especially bad.

It's a great site, though, with a dramatic acropolis, fantastic Hellenistic walls, and a super cool necropolis and a panoramic view of the Greek island of Lesbos. (Cue Lesbian jokes.)

The necropolis of Assos is right outside the city walls.

There's also a few archaeological digs (which shall remain nameless) that get free beer from Efes Pilsen as an 'in-kind donation'. I am told it is used for 'professional development'.

Then there's wine. There's lots of examples but it's been a real long day, so I'll give you one: the 'Kızıbel' wine from Likya vintners. It's named after the wonderful painted tomb discovered near Elmalı in Muğla provınce in 1969, and excavated by the late Machteld Mellink of Bryn Mawr College. The bottle reproduces the charioteer from the inner walls of the tomb, which demonstrates Greek influence in southwest Anatolia already in the 6th century BC. Honestly I have little memory of how this wine tastes. Kind of merlot-y I think. The Turkish wine industry is more or less where California was in the early 1980s - lots of ambition but lacking a lot of phenomenal product. They have labeling covered, however.





Like my memories of this wine, the wall paintings in the tomb itself are fragmentary but show a lively realism. The ancient Likyans were optimistic that their favorite things in daily life (chariots, drinking parties) would be with them after death, too, which led to a lot of cool paintings and carvings, most now lost. The southwest coast is a very beautiful region of the Turkey, I recommend a trip.

Moving to Bologna

Apologies for the radio silence from Archaeopop over the last couple weeks. I've been in the throes of moving to Bologna, Italy over the last month or so. Moving anywhere new has its unexpected, time-consuming surprises, especially in countries with a complex bureaucracy. (Yesterday I went to something called the 'Scientific Police' to give them my fingerprints.)

Some of you might be interested in what brought me here. I found a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Management here, working with a small group of faculty and students who are interested in the management of museums and cultural heritage. This summer we started a research project in Turkey, where we'll try to understand the connections between public sector reform (outsourcing, privatization), the local traditions of education and training, and how museums and archaeological sites are operated.

Thinking about the role of government in 'producing' archaeology has been really interesting - it was not a part of my training at all but it explains a lot of peculiar things that people find frustrating when they get to their fieldwork. I have a suspicion where people dig in Turkey (and other countries) is influenced more than we'd like to think by bureaucratic requirements, and by what's going on in the government at a given moment. More evidence that the archaeological record, for everything it tells us about the past, is given its shape by the present.

Being in a management department is an amusing culture shock for all concerned - when I told them I'm an archaeologist several people got this amazing facial expression that was like 'that's cool' and 'whut?' and 'perhaps you are lost, can I help you?' mashed up into one facial expression. Drop whatever humanist stereotypes you might have about business people though, it's a very interesting and very nice group of people.

p.s. Obviously living in Italy has some benefits in terms of archaeopop-iness, since it's basically a giant museum that everyone pretends is a country. I'll be sharing as much as I find the time for!

p.p.s. Bring on the sliced meat jokes. I never get tired of them.

Theft from the world's oldest temple

Göbekli Tepe and its striking stelae.

Göbekli Tepe in southeast Turkey is the world's oldest known site of religious worship, with a 'temple' going back at least to the early Neolithic (9000 years). Last week Milliyet reported (Turkish) the theft of a newly discovered statue from the site. The 40-centimeter high, T-shaped stela had a human head above and an animal figure below and had been left in place in the excavation area. Sunday, when most of the excavation team was off work, archaeologist Gülsüm Yaprak discovered that the new statue was missing and called the gendarme.


A detail of one of the T-stelae. Note the vulture, scorpion, and crazy-looking bird.

I can't find any more news as yet about this major theft. It's hard to overstate the importance of the site, which has evidence for complex architecture and representative art as early as 11,000 years ago - before even the development of pottery.

The new discoveries are finally beginning to reshape the slow-moving consensus of archeology. Göbekli Tepe is "unbelievably big and amazing, at a ridiculously early date," according to Ian Hodder, director of Stanford's archeology program. Enthusing over the "huge great stones and fantastic, highly refined art" at Göbekli, Hodder - who has spent decades on rival Neolithic sites - says: "Many people think that it changes everything...It overturns the whole apple cart. All our theories were wrong."

If Ian Hodder is blown away, well, you probably should be too. I am, this site is amazing! Not least because it confirms my opinion that early people were much more like us than we usually give them credit for. The picture of the neolithic emerging from Çatalhöyük, Göbekli, and other sites in the region changes totally our picture of hunter-gatherers - from grunting savages in skins to settled communities with complex ideas and artistic traditions, who just happen to live on wild animals and plants rather than cultivated ones. Klaus Schmidt of the German Archaeological Institute, the excavation director, thinks that the stelae represent shamanistic religious traditions. Even more cool, there's lots of vultures juxtaposed with human body parts, suggesting that these people practiced sky burial, which survives in only a few remote places today (e.g. see this insane slide show or this video from Tibet).



Of course, such stuff is catnip for the unscrupulous collector, whose ego tells them they should have the right to "own" something like these stelae. I wonder if the theives were opportunistic, or whether the theft was commissioned? The fact that the stela was recently found points to inside knowledge and a certain familiarity with the archaeologists' routines. Local farmers? Workmen? Archaeologists? The Gendarmes? There's overlap between local mafias and antiquities smuggling in southeast Turkey. Depending on the area they could be connected to the Kurdish rebels, the army or gendarmes, or both.

The excavation has been closed to the public until further notice. How long it will take for the stela to show up in some museum, with an innocent-looking tag that says: "Syria or Anatolia. Purchased from an old private collection"? Whoever touches this thing deserves our rich contempt.

Santa Claus lives by the beach

(hispic cafe)

If you grew up in a northern European cultural environment, Santa Claus definitely lives in a cold climate. Reindeer, fur suit, snow, sleigh, Coca Cola, et cetera. Something like the picture above. (Which was taken in July, in Japan, of course.)

So being confronted with the historical St. Nicholas is a bit bizarre. He was the bishop of Myra, today's Demre on Turkey's southern coast. Demre's a flat fairly unexciting agricultural town, one of those places you pass through on the way to somewhere else. But it does have a central attraction: the church of St. Nicholas (and his original burial spot), which got 395,000 visitors in 2009 according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Jenny and I stopped by last month on our way to somewhere with more beach and better scenery.

The church is mostly obscured by this hideous roof, presumably built for 'conservation' purposes.

The choir and altar.

There's been some controversy about the site lately. The Turkish government changed the name of the site from "St. Nicholas Church" to "Father Christmas Museum" (Noel Baba Müzesi) last year, in what some people see as a stab at Christianity. The new name is certainly stupid because what you see is a semi-ruined medieval church with some nice Byzantine frescos. No reindeer, fir trees, or jolly fat men with beards.

The new name of the church made me expect a nonstop Santa Claus kitsch explosion, but there is in fact a totally different kind of kitsch - a long chain of Russian icon shops! St. Nicholas is actively venerated year-round by devout Russian orthodox, and there were indeed women praying at the statue near the entrance to the Church.

A visitor prays to St. Nick.

 

Shops packed with icons and other goodies oriented to the Russian market.

There's also a statue of St. Nick set up by the Antalya Santa Claus foundation celebrating the "International Santa Claus Activities" of 1998. Sounds weird but I'm sure it was fun for the international crowd of youth participants. Am kinda curious what they did! 

This brings us to a less-known story about the Turkish med coast: it's now dominated by Russian tourists, who are famous for wandering around archaeological sites in absurdly scanty bikinis (yes, the men too) and sometimes high heels. It's amusing that Russia should finally get the warm water port the czars dreamed of for centuries - but in the form of Antalya's endless holiday villages.

St. Nicholas is no longer buried in Demre. Some sneaky Italians stole his bones in an undercover operation in 1087 and brought them to Bari, from where they may or may not have been stolen and brought to England, Germany, or Venice. Last Christmas Nezdat Çevik of Akdeniz University, who excavates at Demre, and Antalya Museum director Cumali Ayabakan teamed up to request repatriation of "Santa's Bones" from Bari:

Çevik reiterated St. Nicholas’s remarks in which he said, “I was born here, raised here and I will be buried here.” The professor added that “we should respect the wish of St. Nicholas. The bones should be brought back to his grave in Demre.”

Çevik has also urged state authorities to take steps to contact their Italian counterparts. “The ministries should work to move the bones back to Turkey.” The scholar also emphasized the significance of St. Nicholas’s grave in terms of tourism and said that the number of tourists visiting the church in Demre will drastically increase when the bones are returned.

It's interesting that here, repatriation is not tied to sentimental concerns about colonialism or the spirits of the ancestors, but rather to the chance to generate cash from tourists. As repatriation becomes more mainstream, it also seems to be attracting preposterous proposals like this.

Recently the Koç Foundation - run by Turkey's richest industrialist family - has taken over some aspects of site management at the church. Judging by this sign, the former funders - the World Monuments Fund and the Samuel H. Kress foundation - have suffered a damnatio memoriae. I'm dying to know the back story on this one.

WMF WTF?

"Reenactors" at Ephesus

I was at Ephesus last week and they were setting up some mysterious stands along the harbor road. Turns out it was a 'reenactment' of 'ancient Ephesus'.

These guys were supposed to be 'gladiators', though those look more like Roman military uniforms to me. Note the total lack of beefcake compared to the real thing:

They looked like they were having fun anyway, even if the swordplay wasn't overwhelming. There was also some interpretative dance. I'm not entirely sure why anyone would pick these colors for anything historical, since before the invention of aniline dyes after 1856 such bright colors would have been impossible, or extremely expensive, to create.

The whole thing was supervised by "Caesar" and "Cleopatra", dressed in grape juice purple. While I'm on color, another one of my pet peeves is that the Imperial 'Purple' was really more of a scarlet with some pink in it, but everyone goes with this grape candy color.

I can be catty about this stuff at times, but I thought the trumpeters did look pretty fly standing on the ancient wall.

The whole production, I found out later, is staged for the benefit of passengers on Norwegian Cruise Line, which disgorges its thousands onto buses and dumps them at Ephesus for a couple hours.

Turkey is experimenting with renting out archaeological sites for events like this, a development which I'm totally neutral about generally. I mean, there's a ton of ancient cities and theaters and stuff that if used right can add a lot to both the tourist economy and cultural life (the most famous in these parts being the Aspendos Festival). Like in anything commercial, however, quality control is pretty key, and that's the worrisome part when delicate ancient ruins are in question.

Noah was a Pirate

Some Noah's Ark news from the 'what the hell?' department:

To a score of marching drums and pipes, we see the expedition trudge across a snowy expanse and up the mountain. They camp on a hilly bluff, the sun setting over the Anatolian hinterland below. Moments later, we go inside a dark cave and watch members of the expedition inspect what appears to be a solid wooden wall, entombed within layers of glacial ice and volcanic rock. A gnarled beam runs suspended from one part of the cavern to another. There's straw and bits of old rope on the ground; a structure is taking shape. What is it? According to the explorers, it's Noah's Ark, literally frozen in time.

This is the footage of the alleged discovery of the biblical vessel, perched more than 12,000 ft (4,000 m) high on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, that was first shown to journalists on April 25 at a press conference in a fancy boutique hotel in Hong Kong. On hand were members of the team, composed largely of Hong Kong–based Evangelicals, an art historian and a handful of Turkish academics and government officials. They displayed specimens of objects recovered from the supposed ark, which they say they encountered in seven dismembered compartments within the mountain: on show are pieces of petrified wood allegedly carbon-dated at 4,800 years old, a chunk of crystal and a cluster of seed-like pellets. "There is a tremendous amount of evidence that this structure is the ark of Noah," said Gerrit Aalten, a Dutch researcher of ark lore who was enlisted to evaluate the team's findings.

Extreme secrecy? Check. Ulterior motives (via religious enthusiasm)? Check. Data preview in a hotel in Hong Kong? Uhhhh, check. The videos, of course, tell us nothing substantial:





What the hell is going on in that cave? What is that stuff they're displaying? If they really were robbing things from an archaeological site and taking them abroad without permits, these guys would be vandals eminently qualified for a stint in a Turkish prison. (That fact alone proves that this 'news' comes from the land of fantasy.) Comically, even other Noah's Ark "researchers" are now piling on: Bob Price of Liberty University wants to find the ark himself, so he's denouncing the Chinese researchers as "frauds", as Wingnut Daily reports:

Dr. Price, who is spearheading efforts to explore two competing locations for Noah's Ark, sent an e-mail dispatch to supporters with his personal take on the alleged find, asserting the structure is a hoax perpetrated by a Kurdish guide and his partners to extort money from Chinese evangelical Christians.

This stuff just bugs me. These guys are trying way too hard, and they don't even know their Bible particularly well. They apparently didn't get the bulletin that the Genesis flood story is a newcomer among flood myths. There's the Sumerian flood story (18th century BC or older) where King Ziusudra is warned by the god Enki to build a big boat and put some animals on it to survive. Or the Akkadian version, which features Atrahasis and the ocean god Ea in the same roles. Or Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh hears the flood story from Utnapishtim, who survived the flood by building a giant boat full of animals, which was carried by the waters to rest on Mt. Nisir. This convenient website runs down the parallels for you.

The Noah story in Genesis is a cover version of these stories - but it's like the cover version that you never knew was a cover until later, then your mind is kind of blown by how good and different the original is. (My favorite examples: Rod Stewart vs. Tom Waits, and Calexico vs. The Damned vs. Love.)

Even if you prefer to pretend that those ancient Hebrews weren't influenced by their cultural betters and sometime masters, the Assyrians, there's still some inconvenient facts. Like, the flood story in Genesis is made up of two sources cleverly spliced together. (Like all of the Pentateuch, which derives from four separate texts.) If you know your Bible, you've noticed the contradictory facts in Genesis. Like, in one place Noah takes two of each animal (Genesis 6:20) and in another place he takes seven pairs of each clean animal and just two of all the rest (7:2). Or in one place Noah sends out a raven (8:7) and in another place it's a dove (8:8-10). But more than that, the stories are quite different, and emphasize different aspects of the tale: see this great side-by-side reading of the two stories for more.

This is all basic stuff for anyone who's been to seminary, but ministers never preach it in church, presumably because they'll alienate irritatingly sincere fundamentalists like these guys who are dicking about on Ararat looking for tangible evidence of a polysemic myth that's 4000 years old. The Noah/Utnapishtim/Atrahasis/Ziusudra flood story has been through so many versions and contortions that it should be understood more as something like a 4chan meme in its fluidity and adaptability and, well, viral-ness.

Yes, I just made a connection between Gilgamesh, Pedobear, and Rod Stewart. You can be impressed now.

My prediction: the whole 'taking the bible literally' thing is going to be seen in retrospect as a historical fluke. The implications for the whole field of 'Biblical Archaeology' are, I hope, obvious enough that I don't have to say anything ungentlemanly.

Riding Anatolia with Evliya Çelebi

(Hoofprinting)

From Ottoman historian Caroline Finkel comes news of a horseback reenactment of the itinerary of a great early modern traveler (via H-Turk):

This is to announce that the first phase of the Evliya Çelebi Ride, in
western Anatolia, is now completed. We were on the road for 40 glorious
days and 40 nights, leaving Evliya in Simav, from where he continued
to Izmir and ultimately to Mekke which he reached in spring 1672, while
we returned to Kütahya.

Home from our journey, we learnt that 2011, the 400th anniversary of
our hero's birth, has been proclaimed the year of Evliya Çelebi by Unesco.
We could not have hoped for more exciting news, not just for our project
but for everyone everywhere. Congratulations to those who achieved this
remarkable coup.

Evliya Çelebi (1611-1682) was a great Ottoman traveler, whose Seyahatname, or Book of Travels, is am important source for the history of the Ottoman lands. His travels took him from Istanbul to Austria, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Egypt, Persia, and Mecca. The trip helped to inaugurate the “Evliya Çelebi Way”, “an international project of historical re-enactment and cultural re-connection that will establish a Cultural Route through Western Anatolia”.

(Hoofprinting)
The ride, an international group including literature professors, equestrians, and a retired ambassador, began on the third day of the Şeker Bayramı (sugar holiday), and retraced Evliya’s route from Istanbul as far as Simav, in west-central Anatolia. The ride’s blog has some great pictures. Apparently some villagers called the Gendarmes on seeing this strange group of riders, thinking they were sheep rustlers!

Large sections of Evliya’s route are now off the beaten path, and riding offers a new way of seeing beautiful, undeveloped parts of the Anatolian countryside that are otherwise unaccessible. However, underdevelopment is a problem, even in relatively better-off western Turkey:

“The countryside along the route is much neglected and the people are, we discovered, barely better off than villagers in the east,” Finkel lamented. Similar to the “Lycian Way” and “St. Paul's Trail,” the EÇR book will help to contribute to the local economy through sustainable tourism and could also act as a catalyst for local development projects along the route. (Today's Zaman)

I love the increasing interest in the scholarly, tourism, and NGO communities in promoting cultural routes, landscapes, and intangible heritage more generally - a move away from the traditional fetish for sites and monuments as the only way to experience the past, toward a more holistic view that includes traditions, practice, and experience. (I’m also glad to see that Finkel and her fellow riders are planning to translate more of Çelebi’s work, only small parts of which have ever been made available in English.)

A couple more photos, from the Hoofprinting blog:

Ajda Pekkan Plays Hasankeyf

(Doğa Derneği)

Turkish pop star Ajda Pekkan played Hasankeyf last week, drawing 10,000 fans as part of Hürriyet newspaper’s “Freedom Train” – a project to raise awareness of human rights issues among children and women in southeast Turkey. (Video of the show is here, embedding disabled for some reason). Hasankeyf is a dramatic cliffside town on the Tigris River, full of magnificent medieval ruins. It would be largely flooded by the proposed Ilisu Dam, which has recently been denied funding (again) by European governments. Hürriyet reported:

Thousands flooded in to Hasankeyf from neighboring districts such as Şırnak, Mardin and Diyarbakır to watch a historic performance by superstar Ajda Pekkan and supporting rock band Yüksek Sadakat. “It is a great pleasure to be here with you in this unique concert at such a historic and beautiful location. We must not allow the 12,000 years worth of history that sits in this location to be usurped by a dam,” Pekkan said at the opening of the concert. Quoting one of her songs “I was born a free person I will leave a free person,” Pekkan told the crowd that Hasankeyf must live freely as well. “Even when we leave this location tomorrow we will continue to take responsibility for this area,” Pekkan said.
...
The Ilisu project calls for damming the Tigris River and building a 1,200-megawatt power station as part of a $32 billion irrigation plan for impoverished provinces in Turkey’s southeast. Turkey planned to relocate antiquities and monuments from Hasankeyf, the region’s only surviving city built during the Middle Ages, with roots dating to the Assyrians. Critics of the project, which would create a 300-square-kilometer lake, include Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. The dam would destroy 400 square kilometers of river habitat that includes species such as the Euphrates soft-shell turtle.

This trailer for Sakae Ishikawa's "Life in Limbo" offers a glimpse of the city:



As Pekkan notes, Hasankeyf is at the eye of a storm of environmental, human rights, and historic preservation activism, now led by the the Doğa Association, Turkey’s major environmental NGO.
It’s a complicated situation for archaeologists. In the past two decades a series of dams have built on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkey under the auspices of the Southeast Anatolia Project. Most of the rivers' length is now dammed. Extensive salvage surveys and excavations¹ have revealed hundreds of sites and recovered stunning works such as the famous Zeugma mosaics.

A mosaic at Zeugma on the Euphrates. Much of the site is now flooded by the Birecik Dam (Photo NOVA)

However, thousands more sites from the river valleys that were the “cradle of civilization” from have gone underwater unrecorded and unstudied. A couple years back I published a study of the politics of archaeology in Turkey’s large dam projects, and concluded that archaeology was used as a political football by both dam proponents and opponents alike, while archaeologists themselves remained relatively silent on the issue.

(Mehmet Masum Süer)

Mostly, archaeologists accept the trade-off between development and salvage archaeology: we get some scraps of data before the site gets destroyed. Hasankeyf raises the question of where to draw the line: it’s the last major free-flowing stretch of either the Tigris or Euphrates in Turkey, and is inarguably a site of major archaeological significance. Is there a point where we as archaeologists should stop accepting development plans, and protest instead? (And what are the criteria for doing so?)

There’s an excellent petition to declare Hasankeyf and the Tigris valley a World Heritage Site. You can sign it here.

Türkiye'de yaşayanlar Doğa Derneği üyesi burada olabilir. (Turkish residents can join the Doğa Derneği here.)

If you like environmental report evaluations (I confess, I do), German NGO WEED has done detailed critiques of the environmental impact reports and resettlement plans for Ilisu (German with some reports in English).


(Doğa Derneği)

¹ Salvage work for the Southeast Anatolia Project dams has generated a large bibliography. Some highlights:

Algaze, G. (1989) A new frontier: first results of the Tigris-Euphrates Archaeological Reconnaissance Project, 1988. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 48:241-281.

Arık, M.O. (2001) 1999 Excavations at Hasankeyf. In N. Tuna, J. Öztürk, and J. Velibeyoğlu, eds. Salvage Project of the Archaeological Heritage of the Ilısu and Carchemish Dam Reservoirs – Activities in 1999. Ankara: METU Historic Environment Research Center.

Kennedy, D., ed. (1998) The Twin Towns of Zeugma on the Euphrates. Rescue Work and Historical Studies. JRA Supplemental Series 27. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology.

Özdoğan, M. (1977) Lower Euphrates Basin 1977 Survey. İstanbul: Middle East Technical University.

Tuna, N., J. Öztürk, and J. Velibeyoğlu, eds. (2001) Salvage Project of the Archaeological Heritage of the Ilısu and Carchemish Dam Reservoirs – Activities in 1999. Ankara: METU Historic Environment Research Center.



The tomb of Zeynel Bey (Mehmet Masum Süer)

Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia

BLDGBLOG reports on an upcoming film that nearly makes me wet my pants with excitement:

While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has "managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach," down there in flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul's heavily touristed religious structure.
In the process, they have discovered 800-year old submerged graves containing the remains of "canonized children."
This was just part of a larger, underwater archaeo-spatial survey:

The divers and specialists explored the connection of the basins underneath Aghia Sophia with the aqueduct and the palace of Top Kapi. In addition they attempted to locate the secret tunnels from Tekfour Palace to the Islands.

Those "secret tunnels" are presumably the rumored subterranean extensions of the Anemas Dungeons – but who knows.

Secret tunnels from Tekfur Sarayı to the Islands? Subterranean dungeons? Sign me up!

Publish or Perish?

The TAY Project is a private NGO based in Istanbul. They document looting, record threatened sites, and have started an inventory of archaeological sites in Turkey. They also have a site looting hotline, where you can report ongoing illegal excavations.

I'm struck by their latest project, called 'Publish or Perish':

Today, if there is no scientific need or a rescue purpose, the general attitude is leaning towards not to excavate. And, if there is a real need for an excavation, that ‘need’ and purpose has to be definitely included in the ‘final report’. We also have to remember that, first of all and before the ‘report’, there must be a “final” for the archaeological excavation, which is very rare in our country.

At that point, our discussion at TAY turned to “final reports” and we wondered how many archaeological excavations we had in Turkey and how many of them had their “final reports”. This was not a very easy question to answer. Apart from “final reports”, there was not an archaeological excavations list for Turkey.

So, at first hand, we began preparing that list, which took unnecessarily long time. Main reason for this delay also proved our main idea; there was not many ‘final reports’.

The list that follows is pretty depressing: by TAY's reckoning, barely 10% of sites in Turkey have final reports, and many projects keep digging every year and only publish a paper here and there.

This is not to say that _nothing_ has been published from these sites, which makes the list a little bit unfair. For example, the Summers' team at Kerkenes Dağ publishes quite a lot: annual excavation reports, popular bulletins, and papers yearly in Anatolia Antiqua or Anatolian Archaeology. The same can be said of Gates and Redford's work at Kinet Höyük/Issos (also see here). But it's true that neither has a book that can serve as a reference work for the site, as far as I can tell. Which means that if you want to know something about the excavations, you have to work your way through a lot of diverse material to get an overview of what's going on.

And many sites, of course, have no publications whatever.

Way back in '89, Chris Tilley famously observed that 'digging is a pathology of archaeology': a disease. His point was to say that excavation is not the point of archaeology, but a distraction from the real work of interpreting past human experience. Excavation gives the archaeologist an ego boost and makes us feel like we're 'adventuring' or 'having an authentic experience'. But for sites it's an illness: excavation destroys deposits and exposes materials, like ancient walls, that may require long-term conservation.

Given that, I like TAY's attempts to 'name and shame' and create peer pressure to publish data. Because, really, if you're not publishing data, why are you digging? You should be ashamed of yourself. (Actually, you should stop digging first, then feel ashamed.)

However, I wonder if it isn't time to jettison the notion that 'final publication' has to be in book form. There's no reason excavation records can't be presented to the public as a website, wiki, or other form of online database. (Especially given the state of the publishing industry, where high costs and low print runs ensure that most publications exist only in the most specialized university libraries.) One problem with even the best-kept archaeological data is that it is usually treated as the private property of one particular professor, and not made accessible to the publics for whose benefit archaeology claims to work. In an age where everything is going open-source, archaeological information should follow suit.

Anyone know examples of best practices for online final publications?

Greetings from Istanbul

I just arrived in Istanbul, where I’ll be for a couple days. I’m headed to the wonderful archaeological site of Sagalassos for the summer, where I’ll be helping to start a community archaeology project. (Much more about this later!)

Since Turkey is on my mind lately, I thought I would share some photos of this amazing poster I saw in Kocaeli at the 2007 Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı (Excavation Reports Meeting), an annual government-sponsored archaeology symposium. These were put up as part of the general décor. The man with the dramatic eyebrows is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the modern Turkish state. He gazes over a trippy pastiche of iconic ruins: Ephesus, Nemrud Dağı, Dıvriği, the Trojan horse, and a theater (I think from Hierapolis/Pamukkale).


This picture is mind-blowing on so many levels! Atatürk himself was something of a patron of archaeology (especially Hittite), and visited digs like Alacahöyük and Gavurkale while he was president (1924-1938). But there’s much more than that going here. With a visionary look in his eyes, he (and by extension the Turkish Republic) is claiming and supervising the archaeology of Anatolia. A less obvious aspect of this picture is that these are all sites on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Turkey has thousands of cool archaeological sites, but only nine are on the WHL (with 23 more on the Tentative List, mostly awaiting preparation of site management plans). Choosing these alone as the symbols of the nation’s archaeology implies that the real concern here is using archaeology to define Turkey’s place in the world. It's part of an old tale: much of Turkey's modern history has been consumed with its quest to gain acceptance as a modern European state. The lack of public knowledge about archaeology among Turks today reflects how much the nation's self-image has been created for foreign consumption.


That this image is not often crafted by archaeologists is amusingly evident in the choice to use the Trojan Horse model now at the entrance to the site of Troy as the symbol of the site. The horse is an entirely modern fiction - it represents the idea of Troy rather than anything about the archaeology of the site itself. (Unconnected aside: when I visited Troy, the first thing I heard was twittering Greek voices inside it - the Trojan Horse was literally filled with Greeks!)