The summer campaign at Troy has begun!
Group photo of the archaeological teams working in Troy this summer. Unfortunately, Fleur van der Sande arrived too late to make it for the picture.
Last weekend, we have arrived safely at Troy in Turkey, where we were warmly welcomed by our Turkish colleagues. Ancient Troy at the moment is an exciting place with many activities going on simultaneously: the construction for the new museum, the creation of new pathways for visitors and three excavation trenches of the Turkish team directed by Professer Rüstem Aslan of the Onsekiz Mart University at Çanakkale. In addition, countless tour buses with tourists arrive. In this excitement, the Amsterdam team began its own project of Archaeology of Archaeology at Troy.
The site of Troy today is as much the result of the archaeological excavations than of the ancient habitation. During the campaigns led by Heinrich Schliemann (1870-1890), Wilhelm Dörpfeld (1893-1894), Carl Blegen (1932-1938) and Manfred Korfmann (1988-2005) much of the original tell (a hill created by layers of habitation) has been removed. The white roof in the picture above indicates where the original surface was before the excavations began. More than 2/3rds is gone, leaving a mumble jumble of walls from different phases.
Before beginning the fieldwork, we need to know exactly where to set out our trenches. By Tuesday, we had agreed amongst ourselves and with our Turkish colleagues where exactly we would excavate. Bart Rendering managed to locate all the geographical fixed points necessary to plot our trenches in the field. Ailbhe Turley in the meantime had done a great job to organize the administration and the storage of the data. Wednesday morning, we were all ready to begin.
According to the plans made during our spring campaign in June, one of our trenches would be in House VI E. It is one of the great mansions, which belongs to the Late Bronze Age city (1750-1300 BCE). Carl Blegen sunk a test trench in the floor of this house of ca. one meter wide and more than 3 meters deep. He reports several floors, a wall and ledges in the mansion’s outer wall. The test trench was later filled in. Fleur van der Sande began to look for Blegen’s trench, helped by two Turkish workmen. After 10 cm’s of digging, the fill of Blegen’s test trench clearly showed and we will be excavating it in the coming days .
Not according to plan is our second trench. For the new tourist walkway, a small hill has to be removed, which turned out to be a dump-site, dating back to the Dörpfeld excavations at the end of the 19th century. This was a good opportunity to excavate one of these dumps, to see what material was thrown away those days. Moreover, it would enable us to develop a strategy for how to excavate such dumps, which will be one of the goals in 2019. Already during the cleaning works, the dump yielded its first finds. Apparently in the 1980’s people had been drinking beer in the area and throwing away their empty cans.
We have spent much time to discuss what we are actually looking for in our excavations. Slowly, the first results are coming in and we are seeing that the various deposits are composed of different man-made materials and of different natural materials such as shell and stones. We are now beginning to compare these deposits and hope to be able to tell you more on results next week. Also, we will start excavations at two different spots, so we expect to be able to show results also from the Schliemann and Korfmann campaigns.
Best regards from Sunny Troy. We will keep you updated.
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