The last week of work at Troy (for now...)
This Friday was the last day of working at Troy. We have begun our journey back to Amsterdam, where we all hope to have some time to relax, shower and not get up at 06:00 am! Last Wednesday afternoon we had our last day of excavating in the trenches. The remaining two days were spent doing the find processing and administering the finds. We have been able to give a full copy of all our data to our Turkish colleagues. Now it is time for us to begin to start interpreting the results of our hard work.
The Bump excavated by Vita Gerritsen has now been covered in geo-textile, in order to preserve the mud-brick blocks. Even though this curious hill did not turn out to be a fill from the Schliemann days, it did provide a lot of information about his way of excavating and, especially, his attitude towards architectural remains, notably mud-bricks. We have already selected two locations at the site to investigate the Schliemann campaigns next year.
Nina Magdelijns and her workmen have dug a hole more than 3 meters deep in the dump of W. Dörpfeld. One of the surprising things has been the amount of architectural debris. Over the winter we need to understand why Dörpfeld, an architect himself, apparently, took so little interest in these remains. Another surprise in this trench is the complete absence of 19 century material. The excavators in the 1890’s must have been very careful of their possessions and have dumped their garbage elsewhere.
In 1935, C.W Blegen excavated a trench, which was backfilled immediately after. The wall he saw and briefly mentions in a report, has not seen light for 83 years, but was re-discovered by Fleur and Mert last week. The wall is substantial and it is still a bit of a mystery why Blegen did not include it in his publications. It will now continue to be visible to the public, albeit in a more than 2 meter deep trench.
While all finds were being cleaned, registered and studied, a full record of photo’s was made of all excavation trenches. We will use these photo’s for photogrammetric reconstructions, so we can present the trenches to you in 3D. The 3D models will also help us to reflect on our own excavations and to study relations between specific finds and archaeological layers.
The 2018 campaign of the Amsterdam Troy Project has been an experimental project. As far as we know, no-one has yet systematically excavated fills and dumps archaeologically. We have enough information to keep us busy during the winter. It has become clear that we will be going back to Troy next year to continue the work. But we have also made friends there: Our Turkish colleagues organized a warm goodbye event, during which they prepared Testi kebabı, a local stew in a ceramic pot. We will look back on a wonderful summer campaign in the coming months when we will be interpreting our data. We will keep you updated !!
0 comment