I have been working as object registrar and collections manager at Tell Atchana, Alalakh Excavations in Turkey since 2014. During excavation seasons my work usually consists of recording objects and samples on our database, organising our storage facility and making sure all objects are where they are supposed to be. When specialists come to visit, for example bioarchaeologists, zooarchaeologists, palaeobotanists, or our bead or lithics specialists, I help them find their objects or samples and advise them on recording methods according to our system. I also teach our international group of students object handling and recording skills. For the last ten years I have therefore spent most of my time during season at our research centre where we store our finds and where our offices are, and not in the field. This year I decided to venture out into the great unknown and spend one day a week in the field. Reader, let me tell you: It was muddy!
The Tell Atchana excavations investigate the Bronze Age/Iron Age city of Alalakh, located in the Amuq Valley, Hatay (Turkey), along the major branch of the Orontes River, near present-day Antakya. Covering an area of 22 hectares, it is the largest Middle and Late Bronze Age (2100–1100 BC) settlement in the region and was the capital of the regional kingdom of Mukish in the 2nd millennium BC. Located at a crossroad and in the buffer zone between Anatolian, Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean cultures, traces of early cultural connections and signs of Bronze Age globalization were revealed at the settlement during the 1930s and 1940s excavations under the leadership of Charles Leonard Woolley. The renewed excavations, begun in 2003 under the direction of K. Aslıhan Yener (then Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, later Koç University, Istanbul) as part of the Amuq Valley Regional Projects and continued by Murat Akar (Mustafa Kemal University, Hatay) since 2020, have focused on new exposures and archaeological research questions as well as integrating and reinterpreting Woolley’s previous work within the context of modern field and lab methodologies. The site is open to visitors as an archaeological park.
In 2019 we had begun preserving the structures uncovered by Leonard Woolley’s excavation using sustainable mudbrick reconstruction methods. This not only gives visitors a better overview of the complicated architectural remains, but also gives us archaeologists a better understanding of ancient construction methods through experimental archaeology. As at many sites in the Middle East, the large-scale excavation of mudbrick architecture (Woolley exposed nearly 50,000 m²), without plans to preserve this cultural heritage for future generations, has left the current project leadership with a complicated legacy. The Level VII (Middle Bronze Age) and Level IV (Late Bronze Age) palaces and temples yielded an extraordinary range of finds that have made a major contribution to the chronology of the wider Eastern Mediterranean. These buildings are therefore of primary importance for archaeology. Equally importantly, the entire site is one of the major cultural heritage assets of the region and its inhabitants.
