Returning to Antiochia
- Grace M. Hermes
- Jul 3, 2022
- 3 min read
After a 3 year hiatus, I have finally arrived back in Turkey to excavate again! This time I'm here with my friend Robyn from my MA cohort at Cornell who will be doing field work for the first time. I am so excited to show her all my favorite spots in Gazipasa over the course of our four weeks here.
Things move fast around here, so we were up at 5:30am and on our way to the site the very next day. The American students are working in the small bath complex, which is a regional variation on the typical Roman bath. A typical Roman bath has three chambers: a frigidarium (cold room), tepidarium (warm room), and caldarium (hot room). The small bath has a central hallway lined with frigidariums on one side and more chambers on the other. I'm pretty excited to be working in this area because it has yielded some of the most interesting finds in previous seasons, including a 17th century coin hoard and several burials. Below are some images from our first two days of work!
Although I've been here for two weeks, the reason I haven't posted yet is because unfortunately I ended up getting Covid on the first weekend. I was in quarantine all last week which was a bummer, but thankfully I am now feeling much better and was able to leave this past Saturday. I felt very lucky to have Robyn here who checked in on me and brought me lots of snacks!
I was glad to be released on Saturday because on Sunday we took a field trip to the neighboring city, Alanya, to visit the archaeological museum! The museum is small but holds a great representative collection of local archaeological material. The highlight for us was getting to see the bronze pegasus that was found in the Antiochia harbor in 2004. It would have been attached to the bow of a ship, and potentially indicates pirate activity at Antiochia! We spent the rest of the day exp
loring the medieval citadel of Alanya which is reached by cable car. Robyn, Zoe, Gigi, and I enjoyed shopping for souvenirs amidst the ruins as well as the amazing view.
Alanya Archaeological Museum. 2. Roman grave stele. 3. The pegasus bronze. 4. Carving of lovers
This week I have been working with the bone team, or "kemik takımı" in Turkish! I have taken a few bioarchaeology classes at Cornell this year so I was very excited to get field experience working with human remains. I won't be showing any pictures of the remains out of respect for the individuals whose bodies we discovered. Even though it has been a very long time since these people were alive, it is considered best practice not to share images of ancient human remains on social media or to give them names other than "Individual 1," etc. Although their burial sites have been disturbed by our work, we try to do our best to honor their personhood in the way we treat their remains.
The excavation technique is extremely precise, as the bones are very fragile due to the pressure of the soil. We also have to sift every single bucket we remove in case there are smaller bones or fragments that we might have missed! We found two near-complete skeletons in the corridor of the small bath, one in their mid-30's and one in their mid-50's. I learned SO much while working with the bone team, and I'm looking forward to taking more bioarchaeology classes in the fall.
Another highlight of this week was the little visitor we had at the small bath! His name is Dondurma, which means "ice cream" in Turkish, and he has been showing up almost every morning for chin scritches and belly rubs. Leticia, our site supervisor, says he is bad for productivity, and she's absolutely right. I mean, how am I not supposed to take a little break to pet this guy?! He definitely brings smiles to our faces in the midst of the long work day.
Thanks for reading, and I plan to post much more frequently now that I'm out of quarantine. Wear a mask folks!
-GMH
Komentarze