What Have I Actually Been Up To?

I've posted a lot this summer about my experiences and excursions in Turkey, but I'm realizing that I haven't talked at all about my actual work! As you all know, I am a research assistant doing field research at Antiochia ad Cragum. When we first arrived in Turkey, our small team of four had a few days without our professor to scout locations to excavate for the rest of the summer. Our goal was to find a domestic structure because very few houses have been studied in the region and none have been excavated at Antiochia at all. I was excited about the opportunity to study a house where regular people would have lived. Although domestic archaeology doesn't yield the same kind of "museum-worthy" finds as a bath or a temple, it can reveal so much about the daily lives of actual people.

When we first encountered our site it was only accessible via a tiny "path" between the bushes and John had to climb through a hole in the undergrowth to get inside our building. He was the only one wearing pants that day. He climbed inside and saw four walls, which was better than anything else we had found so far that day. If nothing else, there was a building there.

Our first week or so of work was pure manual labor. We marched up to the forest that first morning with our pickaxes and clippers, stared at the trees for a minute, then began hacking away. By the end of the day we had a path and cleared a pile of brush from the building that was as tall as me. After some more chopping, rock hauling, and eventually chain sawing, our site looks like this:

Although the work, especially clearing, is absolutely exhausting, there's such a sense of empowerment when I look at the site every morning and see something that looks like an actual building. Sure, our bodies hurt and we have more than a few scrapes and bruises, but we teased an ancient home out of the wilderness with hardly anything more than our hands. The human body is a powerful thing, and I've felt mine get progressively stronger as the summer has worn on. That's one of the things I love about archaeology. It is still an academic field but it does not shy away from the physical. Your body is just as important of a tool as your brain and the materials the ancients have left behind matter just as much as the texts.

Tools of the trade

We began excavating in the large main room and removed more than a meter of soil by the time we hit the packed earth floor. We found over 15 kilograms of pottery shards, lots of glass, and a few metal pieces. Halfway through the summer John started a test pit off the east corner which revealed that our exterior wall continued past our main room, indicating that it is a much more complex structure than we originally thought.

We hit the floor a few weeks ago and expected to be able to close the unit when we found something unexpected: a plaster corner popping out of the middle of the floor. We excavated below floor level in this area and discovered that there was a large rectangular basin built into the floor. After a consultation from Tim and Michael, we determined that it is a wine press! This changed our hypothesis to believing that our structure began as a house and was later repurposed into an industrial space. The wine press also gave us our best finds of the season: two almost complete amphoras. The one in this photo is the African style and another was a water jug that our pottery expert had never seen at Antiochia before!

Removing these pieces from the soil took a completely different set of techniques than regular excavating. Since the pieces were found in situ (in place), we treated them like bones and delicately removed soil with brushes and the tips of our trowels. The amphora in this photo is more than a meter long, so it took more than a day to remove it completely and get it to the restoration team. Hopefully it will end up in the Alanya museum someday!

Now we only have three full work days left before we have to clean the site and pack up for the season. Our goal is to fully clear the doorway (my test pit) and reveal the exterior side of the front wall. If we have time we plan to get into the area we suspect would have the alley, but time is moving increasingly quickly as we get closer to the end of our time at Antiochia.

It's hard to believe that we only have a week left here. Our site is unrecognizable from the first day, but there's still so much work to do. Our house alone is multiple rooms, and we suspect that there's a whole neighborhood on the surrounding hillside. According to Tim, it's a five year project. I'm definitely getting ready to sleep in my bed and not wake up before the sun, but I would kill for just a bit more time in our little square with this wonderful team. Can you slow time down a little bit, universe? Thanks.

-GMH