8,000 years of history to resurface at Turkey’s Tavşanlı Mound
Excavations set to start at a mound in the central Turkish province of Kütahya in September are expected to shed light on 8,000 years of history, archaeologists said.
An aerial view of the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
Dubbed the “Heart of Kütahya” over its shape detected through aerial footage, the “Tavşanlı Mound” located in the namesake district will be unearthed through the cooperation of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and Bilecik Şeyh Edebali University (BŞEU), along with the support of the Tavşanlı Municipality.
Academics from Ankara University, Ankara Hacı Bayram Veli University, Hacettepe University, Istanbul University, Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University and Uşak University will also take part in the excavations, to be headed by Erkan Fidan, a faculty member at the archaeology department of the BŞEU.
An aerial view from the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
The excavations were launched through a presidential decree and are expected to last some 30 years.
Sezer Seçer Fidan, a Hittitologist who is also in charge of the Tavşanlı Mound site, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the mound was once one of the largest settlements in western Anatolia.
“While previous settlements here were a conglomeration of a couple of villages, as the swamps were filled and drained, it becomes a site that could serve as the basis for urbanization and turn into a capital city.
This corresponds roughly to (a period) four to 5,000 years earlier. Urbanization at this site of course does not consist of a single-phase, but a formation that continues to expand over time,” Fidan said.
Archaeologists work on the Tavşanlı Mound, Kütahya, central Turkey.
She explained that the goal for excavations during this year is to uncover city walls dating back to the Hittites and modern ages, which would prove the importance and scale of the Tavşanlı Mound.
Fidan noted that the mound might contain information, documents and findings on those who have lived in western Anatolia for the last 8,000 years.
“The settlement here lasted until the end of the Bronze Age; therefore, we can see a number of ages stratigraphically. Here, we both want to monitor transitions between civilizations and the exact importance of such a large mound spanning a hectare (in size). … If we can detect buildings related to the Hittite period, then we can find written documents or findings.
It would be a very important finding for western Anatolia since written documents are very rare in this region,” she noted.
Bone workshop and oil lamp shop unearthed in Aizanoi ancient city in western Turkey
A bone workshop and an oil lamp shop have been unearthed in the ancient city of Aizanoi, located in the western province of Kütahya.
The excavations in Aizanoi, which is home to the best-preserved Zeus Temple in Anatolia and is also called the “Second Ephesus,” have been carried out by the Kütahya Museum Directorate.
Gökhan Coşkun, the excavation coordinator and head of the Kütahya Dumlupinar University’s Archaeology Department, told the state-run Anadolu Agency that they were working in areas that were never excavated before.
Coşkun said they carried out work in two different wings of the agora (a public open space used for assemblies and markets in ancient Greece) and reached important findings that would shed light on the trade and social life of the ancient city.
Stating that they were able to identify two of the uncovered shops, he said, “During the excavations, thousands of bone fragments were found inside one of the stores.
Most of them were bones of cattle. It is understood that some of these pieces were used as raw materials, and they were never processed, while some of them began to be processed, but they are half-worked and unfinished. Some pieces that were processed were turned into artworks.
As far as we understand, there was a local bone workshop in Aizanoi during the Roman period and was located in the agora. It served as both a workshop and a sales shop.
Among the processed bone artefacts were mostly women’s hairpins and spoons.”
He noted the second shop was selling oil and oil lamps, adding, “During the excavation of the other shop, we found many intact and broken oil lamps used as the lighting tools in the ancient period. We can see that most of these oil lamps were used.
This shows us that not only oil lamps were sold here, but also oil was poured into oil lamps and burned at that time.
Findings from both shops show us that local products were manufactured in Aizanoi. It is an important finding for us that important production activities were carried out in Aizanoi during the Roman era.”
The excavations at the Aizanoi site, known as the “Second Ephesus” and home to the best-preserved Zeus Temple in Anatolia.
With a history dating back to 5,000 years and situated 50 kilometres from the Kütahya city centre, Aizanoi was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2012.
Turkish workers discover animal skeleton belonging to unknown species
Digging in the yard of an old spinning factory in the eastern province of Iğdır last week, some workers discovered an animal skeleton of an unknown species.
A photo of the animal skeleton, Iğdır, eastern Turkey.
The skeleton, which remained intact under the garden, is about 1 meter (3.3 feet) tall and has the teeth of a predator.
After the workers noticed that some of the tissue attached to the skeleton had yet not deteriorated, they reported their discovery to the academics at Iğdır University’s Biodiversity Application and Research Center.
The academics came to the area where the excavation was made and took the skeleton to the university. They will conduct research to determine the species of the animal skeleton at the university.
Belkıs Muca Yiğit, a lecturer at Iğdır University, told Anadolu Agency (AA) that they will try to find out the species of the animal after the examination.
“Then we will ensure that this skeleton is preserved in a museum,” Yiğit added.
Yusuf Kıtay, the operating officer of the excavation, said the workers found the animal skeleton while they were working in an area that has not been used for the last 30-40 years.
The shape of the skeleton caught the workers’ attention and they reported the situation to the authorities, Kıtay said, adding: “We especially noticed that its hindlimbs are long.
We informed the authorities that it may be an interesting species as its feet do not have hooves but claws, and it also has sharp teeth.”
“The research will be conducted, we are also curious. I hope something interesting will come out and be useful to science,” he added.
Textiles discovered in a Stone Age community explain the history of clothing production.
Cities from the Stone Age sound like an oxymoron. However, 8000-9000 years ago in Turkey, 10,000 people lived at atalhöyük. It’s the largest village from the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras, according to experts.
“Çatalhöyük is one of the most famous archaeological sites,” says Lise Bender Jørgensen.
She is an archaeologist and professor emerita from NTNU’s Department of Historical and Classical Studies and has helped to confirm what people in the ancient city wove their clothes from. Bender Jørgensen is a specialist in archaeological textiles, so it comes as no surprise that she has been involved in this work.
This piece of cloth is from the Stone Age. For 60 years, academics have debated whether it is made of wool or linen. So what is it really made of? The answer will surprise you.
Under discussion for almost 60 years
Experts have been discussing what kind of clothes people wore in Çatalhöyük since 1962 when they found the first pieces of cloth here. Some specialists believed that people made their clothes from wool. Others thought they made them out of linen instead. So who’s right? After almost 60 years, we now know the answer.
“Neither,” Bender Jørgensen and her colleagues say.
Now they have presented their findings in Antiquity, an archaeological journal.
Çatalhöyük is a superstar
You may not have heard of Çatalhöyük, but the city is considered a superstar in archaeological circles.
Professor Ian Hodder shows Antoinette Rast-Eicher around the excavation site.
“When Çatalhöyük was excavated from the late 1950s onwards, it was considered one of the oldest cities ever. Even though new discoveries show that this is no longer true, the place still has a high celebrity factor,” says Jørgensen.
Archaeologist James Mellaart led the earliest excavations. Turkish authorities later expelled him from the country, as he was allegedly involved in the black market sale of archaeological artefacts.
Çatalhöyük the city is genuine, however. People were already living here more than 9000 years ago, and 18 layers of settlements have been identified. People called the city home until about 7950 years ago.
Unearthed textiles from the Stone Age
One of the world’s leading archaeologists, Professor Ian Hodder at Stanford University, undertook new excavations between 1993 and 2017. They yielded large amounts of new data and have provided us with a whole new understanding of the site. The finds made by Hodder and colleagues unearthed several pieces of cloth that later turned out to be between 8500 and 8700 years old.
“When Hodder’s excavations began to reveal textiles, they invited me to examine them with my Swiss colleague Antoinette Rast-Eicher,” Bender Jørgensen says.
Rast-Eicher, who is affiliated with the University of Bern, specializes in identifying fabric fibres. She has experience with some of the oldest European textiles found in Alpine lakes. The two researchers have collaborated on several projects in recent years, including under the auspices of NTNU.
In August 2017, they travelled together to Çatalhöyük and examined the textiles that the archaeologists in Hodder’s group had found. They also collaborated with postdoctoral fellow and archaeobotanist Sabine Karg from the Free University of Berlin. This group of specialists found clear answers.
This is what bast fibre looks like.
A neglected old material
“In the past, researchers largely neglected the possibility that the fabric fibres could be anything other than wool or linen, but lately another material has received more attention,” Bender Jørgensen says.
People in Çatalhöyük used assorted varieties of exactly this material.
“Bast fibres were used for thousands of years to make rope, thread, and in turn also yarn and cloth,” says Bender Jørgensen. A fibre sample from a basket turned out to be made of grass, but several of the textiles are clearly made of bast fibre from oak trees. They are also the oldest preserved woven fabrics in the world.
Bast fibre is found between the bark and the wood in trees such as willow, oak or linden. The people from Catalhöyük used oak bark, and thus fashioned their clothes from the bark of trees that they found in their surroundings. They also used oak timber as a building material for their homes, and people undoubtedly harvested the bast fibres when trees were felled.
The experts’ conclusions also align with another striking point: No large quantities of flaxseed have been found in the region. People in Çatalhöyük do not seem to have cultivated flax.
Bender Jørgensen notes that a lot of people often overlook bast fibre as an early material. “Linen tends to dominate the discussion about the types of fabric fibres people used,” she says.
As it turns out, people in this area did not import linen from elsewhere, as many researchers have previously thought, but used the resources they had plentiful access to.
Dig in Turkey finds theater commode in ancient city of Smyrna
An ancient latrine unearthed in western Turkey WHEN? would have let more than a dozen people drop trou and ‘socialize’ and they did their business. The remains of the convivial commode were discovered in the ruins of a 2,000-year-old theatre in the ancient city of Smyrna, now located inside Izmir, Turkey’s third most populous city.
‘It is a toilet with a U-shaped seating arrangement… that 12-13 people can use together,’ Akin Ersoy, an archaeologist at Izmir’s Katip Çelebi University and leader of the excavation, said in a statement.
‘The use of this toilet space by a large number of people also brought socialization.’
Such social bathroom arrangements were fairly common in ancient Anatolia, which overlaps with much of modern-day Turkey, but this is the first seemingly reserved for performers in a theatre.
‘We think it was used only by artists working in the stage building and performing in the theatre, as the stage building is closed to the audience,’ Ersoy said.
‘Since it is located in a closed area, it is possible to consider it an ‘artist toilet,’ he added, calling the find ‘a first among theatres in the Mediterranean region.’
A 1,600-year-old latrine was uncovered in the ruins of an ancient Roman theatre in western Turkey. Because the building would have been closed off to the public, archaeologists believe the toilet was reserved for actors. The performers would have sat on a U-shaped bench that could accommodate up to 13-people at once
‘There are latrines that serve the audience near the theatres we know, but it is a first for such a place to be used as a toilet in the stage building of the theatre,’ Ersoy said.
When nature called, the performers would have sat on a wooden U-shaped bench, which only rose about 16 inches off the ground and had holes spaced out about two feet apart, Daily Sabah reported, allowing them to sit side-by-side.
In front of the seating is a four-inch trough that would have had clean water flowing through it.
If you were using the latrine you would then dip a sponge on a stick into the trough to clean your backside.
The archaeologists constructed a replica of the wooden bench to confirm their theory about the structure’s use.
The theatre, which had a 20,000-spectator capacity, was built in the 2nd century B.C. when Smyrna and Anatolia would have been under Roman authority.
The latrines, though, were added during a major renovation about 400 years later. Both were in use until about the 5th century A.D. when the Roman empire evolved in the east into the Christianized Byzantine Empire.
The 20,000-seat theatre was built in the ancient city of Smyrna in the 2nd century BC
The theatre and latrine were unearthed at the site of the ancient city of Smyrna in modern-day Izmir, Turkey
Founded more than 2,400 years ago, Smyrna has been the site of numerous archaeological discoveries in recent years.
Ersoy’s team has been excavating the site for five years with support from the Izmir Metropolitan Municipality. In March, they reported finding a stone quarry used in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, according to the Municipality.
Block stones and columns were transported to Smyrna from the ancient quarry, named Tırazlı-Kesikkaya, Ersoy said.
The roughly processed blocks were launched by sledges on stream beds and transported by sea to the Smyrna’s port, Ersoy said, at great cost and with great difficulty.
An archaeologist unearths the statue head of the goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite, Aizanoi, Kütahya, western Turkey, Oct. 29, 2021.
The excavations in the ancient city, which was included in the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2012 and located 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the city centre, are being continued by the Kütahya Museum Directorate.
Excavation coordinator Professor Gökhan Coşkun of Dumlupınar University told Anadolu Agency (AA) that the work in Aizanoi, a site which dates back 5,000 years, was carried on without interruption with 100 workers and 27 technical personnel.
Noting that they have been sustaining their work in a creek bed in the ancient city of Aizanoi recently, Coşkun told that the statuary heads of Aphrodite and Dionysus were unearthed in this creek bed.
“These are important findings for us, as they show that the polytheistic belief culture of ancient Greece existed for a long time without losing its importance in the Roman era,” he said.
“The findings suggest that there may have been a sculpture workshop in the region.”
Home to one of the most well-preserved temples in Turkey, dedicated to the Greek god Zeus, the city of Aizanoi is easily comparable to Ephesus in its grandeur and importance.
Initially inhabited by the Phrygians, the area was converted into a city in the first century B.C. by the Romans and includes unique spots such as a temple; four roman bridges, two of which are still in use today; the world’s first known indoor marketplace, with inscriptions of the prices of goods sold still visible on the walls; theatres; roman baths and an ancient sacred cave.
The 1,500-Year-Old Byzantine Sandals with Sweet Message in Greek
The ancient sandals were discovered almost intact in the Istanbul dig.
A pair of Byzantine sandals uncovered during an excavation in Istanbul has become one of the city’s most popular exhibits at the archaeological museum. The sandals have a message in Greek which reads: “Use in health, lady, wear in beauty and happiness.”
The astonishing find was discovered during digs prompted by the Marmaray project, the undersea railway tunnel connecting the Asian and European sides of Istanbul under the Bosporus.
The excavations, which started in 2004, have revealed new historical aspects of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire.
Some 60,000 artefacts unearthed over a span of around nine years are being preserved in Istanbul Archeological Museum until a special museum is built for them, the Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reports.
The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and continued to exist for another thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe.
Byzantine sandals belonged to a woman
Scientists say that the sandals discovered are more than 1,500 years old and they belonged to a woman.
The Byzantines loved colour and patterns, and they made and exported very richly patterned cloth, especially Byzantine silk, which was woven and embroidered for the upper classes and resist-dyed and printed for the lower.
Modesty was important for all, and most women appeared to be almost entirely covered by rather shapeless clothes.
There has been a considerable amount of footwear recovered in this excavation project, with sandals, slippers and boots to the mid-calf seen commonly in manuscript illustrations also found in the dig. Many of the items are richly decorated in various ways.
The colour red, reserved for Imperial use in male footwear, is actually by far the most common colour for women’s shoes. Purses are rarely visible and seem to have been made of textile matching the dress, or perhaps tucked into the sash.
Byzantine men’s shoes of partially gilded leather, 6th century.
Istanbul excavations reveal gems from the Byzantine Empire
The excavations have found the first traces of civilizations from different periods, including the skeletons of the first Istanbulites; 8,500-year-old footprints’ the Harbor of Eleutherios (Theodosius), a port known in world literature but with no traces having been found previously; and the world’s largest medieval sunken ship collection, as well as 60,000 animal bones of 57 species along with plant fossils.
The Harbor of Eleutherios, which was one of the ports of ancient Constantinople, is located beneath the modern Yenikapi neighbourhood of Istanbul. It was built at the mouth of the Lycus River, which ran through the city to the Propontis.
The harbour was built in the late 4th century, during the reign of Theodosius I, and was the city’s major point of trade in Late Antiquity. It continued to be used until the 11th century.
Silt from the Lycus eventually filled the harbour entirely and the area was later transformed for agricultural use due to the effects of upstream erosion and deposition. In Ottoman times, the area was entirely built over.
In November 2005, workers on the Marmaray project discovered the silted-up remains of the harbour.
Excavations produced evidence of the 4th-century Portus Theodosius. There, archaeologists uncovered traces of the city wall of Constantine the Great, and the remains of over 35 Byzantine ships from the 7th to 10th centuries, including several Byzantine galleys, remains of which had never before been found.
Various findings from the Byzantine era.
In addition, the excavation has uncovered the oldest evidence of settlement in Constantinople, with artefacts, including amphorae, pottery fragments, shells, pieces of bone, horse skulls, and nine human skulls found in a bag, dating back to 6000 BC.
11,000-year-old ‘abandoned’ site found with ‘erected penis’ pillars and head carvings
Archaeologists in Turkey have found evidence that an 11,000-year-old prehistoric site was used for a ceremonial parade through a building containing phallus-shaped pillars and a carving of a human head.
Scientists have been left to speculate how the penis pillars were erected
Called Karahantepe, the site is located in southern Turkey, east of Şanlıurfa, and has a series of buildings that date back to long before writing was invented.
Within the remains of the buildings, archaeologists found carvings of human heads, snakes and a fox, as well as several interestingly shaped pillars.
For instance, the archaeologists discovered 11 pillars near a carving of a human head. “All pillars are erected and shaped like a phallus,” Necmi Karul, a professor of prehistoric archaeology at Istanbul University, wrote in a paper recently published in the journal Türk Arkeoloji ve Etnografya Dergisi.
Researchers excavate at the site of Karahantepe in Turkey on Sept. 30, 2021.
In the journal article, Karul did not speculate as to why the heads and phallus-shaped pillars were built or what meaning they may have had.
This building is connected to three others to form a complex of sorts.
Ancient people may have held a ceremonial parade through this complex, Karul said. Current evidence suggests that people used the complex for “a ceremonial process, entering the building from one end and exiting at the other end, having to parade in [the] presence of the human head” and the phallus-shaped pillars, Karul wrote in the journal article.
More excavation and analysis will need to be done before archaeologists can say for certain that this parade took place, Karul wrote.
Rather than being abandoned, the buildings were filled in with dirt, possibly during a decommissioning ceremony of sorts.
The site dates to a similar time as Gobekli Tepe, another archaeological site that has large buildings and carvings of animals and human heads.
Gobekli Tepe is also located near Şanlıurfa, and archaeologists are trying to determine the relationship between the two sites.
Although Karahantepe was discovered in 1997, excavations didn’t start until 2019. Between those years, researchers completed several archaeological surveys of the site. Karul did not reply to requests for comment.
