Operation - Ziyaret Tepe  
 
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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.

The other big discovery that we made in the 2009 field season was three large buildings, perhaps elite residences, located in the southeastern part of the lower town. These were discovered by Chelsea Jalbrzikowski, a recent graduate of the University of Akron, using a handheld magnetic gradiometer. Our geophysical surveys completed a 100% coverage of the lower town which has pieced together over many field seasons. The gradiometry maps marks the base-point for starting a reconstruction of the city's architecture in the Late Assyrian period.

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!

This project is a joint undertaking of the University of Akron, University of Mainz, Cambridge University, and Marmara Univeristy.

Dr. Timothy Matney is the Project Director.

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copyright © 2009. All rights reserved. This page last updated 13Nov2009.