Fieldwork Report: Kiley Stoj - American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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A Day in the Life at Çadır Höyük

Kiley Stoj, 2024 Eric and Carol Meyers Fieldwork Scholarship Recipient

A typical day living in the small village of Peynir Yemez started about an hour earlier than needed with the adhan informing us that it was 4:30am. This was never really an issue as it was a much more melodic wakeup than the typical jarring buzz of an alarm. Although uncharacteristic for the time of year, there were several mornings we were also greeted with thunderstorms. I can remember a huge clap of thunder waking almost everyone up; we all came out of our rooms and just admired the rain and lightning together while sipping tea and coffee. Unfortunately, after this storm we lost internet connection for almost the remainder of the season, and it was believed the thunder and lightning may have been to blame. Most of the time it was easy enough to fall back asleep until the official wakeup around 5:30; giving most people just enough time to put on their least dusty pieces of clothing, brush their teeth, and grab a cup of coffee and a slice of jellied bread before packing up the van to make the 15-minute drive to the site. The drive over was actually livelier than one might expect for such an early wakeup. We would chat about the games we liked to play, movies we had strong opinions on, and funny anecdotes from prior years or previous digs.

The State University of New Yort at Cortland members of the team. From left to right, me (Cortland alum), Dr. Sharon Steadman (Distinguished Professor at SUNY Cortland, and director of the Çadır Höyük project), and Janet (current archaeology student of Dr. Steadman).

The site of Çadır Höyük is located in the Yozgat province in north central Anatolia, Türkiye. Excavations began in 1994 and continue today. Over this time period the team has documented six millennia of occupation at the site; from at least as early as 5200 BCE to final abandonment in the 13th century CE. The Turkish workers assisting with the project came from the next closest city of Sorgun and were usually waiting for us. Without hesitation they would begin the journey up the mound soon after we arrived; it was a good mix of younger and older workers, some with prior experience and some brand new. The new workers were especially eager to learn the ropes often asking many questions and excited to practice some English with us. It was fun getting to learn a bit about the workers that were a part of our team, their day jobs ranged from farmers, cartographers, and engineers to medical and veterinary students.

The morning started with most supervisors looking over the stratigraphy of their trenches and deciding what task to tackle first. Many times I could look out from my trench and see a group of supervisors huddled around an area delicately, and with the most amazing precision, excavating bones or reading an especially interesting piece of pottery. Many of the foreign members of the team (US, Canada, Europe) would do our best with the little Turkish we knew to delegate tasks; the workers were very patient with us, and I learned pretty quickly that hand signs are an amazing tool. Some of the women I became friends with while there loved to flash me a heart from across the dig to let me know they missed me. We would work until 8am, at which time there was a break for water and some small goodies that the workers always seemed to magically produce, including cookies and fruits. Work in the mornings was always the nicest; it was pleasant to dig before the sun became too intense and wind picked up, as was typical for the afternoon.

Janet and I are learning a new skill of how to take elevation.

At 9am we called “paydos” or “break” which meant it was time to head down to second breakfast; everyone’s favorite part of the day. We would sit under a tent forming what we called a sandwich circle, passing around the various fixings, everyone either with their preference of many olives or absolutely none. We also always had fresh fruit and small cookies to dunk in our tea – you had to be quick with it or risk ending up with a tea-cookie soup as half your biscuit crumbled off into your cup. This was also a time for the entire team to share their thoughts about their trenches with the group as well as a time to get to know everyone better. Second breakfast was a real pick-me-up, giving everyone their second wind to work through the afternoon.

In the afternoons it was typical for supervisors to hop around from trench to trench seeing how others’ work was going and assist if they needed help troubleshooting a difficult locus or feature. The trenches differed immensely! Some had countless hearths found one on top of the other as they excavated down, others had beautiful stone walls and huge expanses of rooms, one was a marbled masterpiece of mudbrick red, and charcoal black (beautiful but hard to understand), while yet another had walls with huge piles of rocks in between (again amazing to see, less amazing to meticulously draw). When work ended around 12:30-1 we had the option to take the bus back, but many of us would opt to simply drop our bags there and walk. It was peaceful strolling through the village, a great way to wind down and clear your head after a hard day of work. The walk took us past golden fields, and through the village where we would wave to some of the local workers, and occasionally have to skirt around territorial geese.

Our living quarters in Peynir Yemez. Filled with fruit and nut trees/shrubs we often snacked from.

Back at the dig house we had down-time until lunch; however, downtime usually meant either cleaning or helping bag artifacts; our director called them “evil jobs” and would always give us a warning on the days we could expect to return to more work. Thankfully many hands made light work, and the jobs were never really as “evil” as we were made to believe. We would all sit down to lunch at 2pm; everyone would take pretty large helpings of food after digging all day and almost always we would make Turkish coffee after so that we had a little kick to keep on going. After lunch people went their separate ways to shower, take naps, or do some reading before our lab hours, which started at 5pm. Many days before lab I would spend time with my new friends picking apricots and plums from the trees, trying my best to learn some Turkish words, and sitting in the sun with a cup of tea as a cool breeze blew by.

The lab hours were a time to write in our notebooks, fill out feature and locus sheets, or do additional work – such as sorting through soil samples to look for seeds, like the project I was assisting with. It was exciting when someone had uncovered a particularly interesting artifact from that day, and everyone gathered around to see what we could learn. Dinner came shortly after 7pm; everyone would hangout for a bit after dinner ended, but no one stayed up too late after the long workday. Usually at sunset small groups would leave the dig house to walk around the village, it was beautiful to see the reds and pinks of the sunset melt into the expansive landscape of gold and yellow. The village was always very quiet and peaceful; mostly being broken by the bells and bleats from the large herds of sheep and cows on their way home for the night. There were special occasions throughout the season where we would go watch meteor showers; finding a dark hill and lying on the ground all betting on which direction the next one would come from. And on Wednesdays we would have a movie night, projecting a film onto the wall of the lab. Card games also became a very popular past time toward the end of the season, and they would get quite lively and competitive; not only for the ones playing but even drawing in small audiences that would root for different players. Eventually, when the fun had been had, everyone would collapse into bed, ready to start work again the next morning.

Close-up of ancient seeds we found in a soil sample.

Me during lab hours filling out feature and locus sheets and recording the details of that day's excavations in my trench.

Kiley loves travel, experiencing new things, and meeting people. After graduating from SUNY Cortland, she spent time in India researching medicinal Ayruvedic plants found in the archaeological record from the Iron Age, supported by a Fulbright-Nehru Student Researcher Fellowship. She is interested in the cross-roads of biology and archaeology and extremely thankful that the ASOR scholarship provided an opportunity to explore this further. Currently Kiley is working on her PhD at the University of South Carolina, investigating nocturnal plant-insect interactions and how anthropogenic stressors impact these relationships.