Digging, Drones, and Digitalization in Central Anatolia
Annalise Whalen, 2023 P.E. MacAllister Fieldwork Scholarship Recipient
Mid-way through excavation, the highest point of the site can be seen in the background near where the Cappadocia Gate and the Palatial Complex are located.
Welcome to Kerkenes, a sprawling Iron Age site located in central Anatolia. This megacity is mysterious as it is vast; Kerkenes was only briefly inhabited for less than a century, before a battle and catastrophic fire caused it to become abandoned. Although the site has been suggested to be that of which Herodotus identifies as Pteria, this description is unconfirmed, and much is left to be learned about the city and its former inhabitants.
Here I joined the ASOR-affiliated Kerkenes Project with the University of Central Florida, where I started my PhD this year working with Kerkenes project director Dr. Scott Branting. Despite a sobering earthquake and busy election season in Turkey preluding our excavation, this year’s field season took place from May until July 2023. Thanks to the generous support of the P.E. MacAllister Fieldwork Scholarship, I was fortunate to participate in an advantageous initial season on the site before starting my PhD program.
The drone (somewhere up in the sky) and GPS in action.
Kerkenes is located in central Anatolia, in the province of Yozgat. This year the Kerkenes team was lucky to be among the first to experience the opening of the new high-speed rail system that now runs from Ankara to Yozgat (yes, the same name as the province), a city within an hour of the field site. I find the Kerkenes Project unique on account of the variety of research methods and experts that collaborate on the single site. This year we conducted geophysical surveys, drone surveys, and excavation in the field, in addition to ongoing material analysis carried out by conservators, zooarchaeologists, paleobotanists, and ceramicists in the nearby compound’s facilities. Digitalization of previous years’ finds is carried out in any spare time the team has, creating a valuable archive of 3D data about the site.
The timing of the field season in Kerkenes is particularly suited to the wide range of surveys and research that is conducted there. Weather in the first few weeks of the season is typically wet and rainy, the moist ground conducive to resistivity surveys. Perhaps thanks in part to El Niño, we had an unusually rainy year that allowed for resistivity to carry on into nearly mid-June. As the spring rain cleared up, excavation began on Urban Block 8, a section of the city located along the northern edge of the city wall. This block is one of the longest-excavated sections of the site and has yielded valuable data concerning urban development and planning of the city and its perimeter defensive wall.
Over June and July, the excavation team successfully excavated new rooms of this block, providing the project with more data that will help us understand the purposes of the specific structures in Urban Block 8. Based upon the 2022 season’s excavation in adjoining rooms of the block, we anticipated the need for accompanying zooarchaeologist researchers to develop a system by which to differentiate bone fragments from ivory in the field. This system expedited the identification process of many materials and made our work in the trench more efficient.
The project’s trusty all-terrain transportation.
Sure enough, this summer’s excavation yielded data which will help us understand the functionality of Urban Block 8’s structures, in addition to the potential diet, animal husbandry practices, storage systems, and art production of the urban block’s residents. Many materials found in Urban Block 8 this year showed evidence of contact with extreme temperatures, serving as further evidence of the reach and intensity of the destructive fire that enveloped the city. The team conducted wet sieving and flotation on many soil samples from this year’s trench, but due to the large volume of soil collected, work from 2023 samples will continue into next year and keep us very busy!
Finds from previous years of the Kerkenes project can be viewed by the public at the nearby Yozgat Museum, as well as in Ankara at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations. The Kerkenes site will continue to be a source of incredible information about the central Anatolian Iron Age and ancient megacities. Recent work on the site investigates urban planning, pedestrian modeling, and shared social spaces that can be applied to cities anywhere, ancient or modern. I look forward to joining the project in the coming years during my doctoral program to help uncover more of this incredible field site.
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