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| TOUR THE SITE |
The 2009 excavation season ended in August after a brief five weeks in the field. Despite the shortened stay, we able to get quite a lot accomplished at Ziyaret Tepe and made a spectacular find along the way. Dr. Dirk Wicke led a team from Mainz University in excavating a reception room in the Bronze Palace on the citadel. The lower occupational layer of this room was excavated in the previous season. It was here that a tiny fragment of a cuneiform tablet was discovered, tantalizingly close to the edge of baulks. In 2009, Dr. Wicke was fortunate to recover more of the tablets, including a well-preserved list of women's names, laying on the earlier of two floors in the reception room. Finally, our ceramic team under the direction of Azer Keskin completed the recording of all the pre-Medieval pottery sherds from Operation A. The procedure involved recording counts and weights by fabric type, forms based on our newly-developed Assyrian pottery typology, and drawing a representative collection. While not as flashy as a new cuneiform tablet or a whole building, this basic, time-consuming work is the real foundation of our understanding of what was happening at Ziyaret Tepe/Tushhan durings its zenith in the Iron Age. Thanks to all the 2009 field staff for a wonderful, productive season! |
