WHEN TWO WORLDS COLLIDE …
Nancy Highcock, 2018 Platt Excavation Fellowship Recipient
Highcock giving the tour of the rooms in the Achaemenid Building.
For the last five years I have had the exciting opportunity to work at the multi-period site of Niğde-Kınık Höyük, located in south-central Anatolia. The site comprises a walled citadel-mound with four excavation areas (Operations A, B, C, and E) as well as an investigation of the lower town (Operation D), located on the western terrace of the settlement. Work on the citadel has proven extremely interesting for both earlier and later periods: the northern citadel walls were first constructed during the Late Bronze Age when this region was under Hittite hegemony and excavation in Area A has revealed the remains of a substantial local cultic center during the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. As a Middle Bronze Age specialist, I have learned a lot about the material culture of other periods in Anatolian history, and my own work in the lower town has proven particularly fruitful in this regard.
Area A: the Hellenistic public plaza in the foreground.
Since 2013, excavations in the lower town of Kınık Höyük have uncovered part of a large domestic building complex dating to the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. As evidenced by a high number of cooking installations and weaving implements such as loom weights, this building witnessed a flurry of domestic production activities over the course of the late 1st millennium BCE. We began the 2018 season by excavating the exposed portions of the building to the same phase in order to conserve the architecture and installations therein for future visitors to the site. They will now be able to see a snapshot of daily life in 5th century central Anatolia!
Area D: Part of the Achaemenid Building.
A big gap in our knowledge about the site, however, was the occupational history of the lower town in earlier periods. In fact, there is generally little data about Bronze and Iron Age lower towns within this region of Turkey. This is where the generous funding of the Platt Excavation Fellowship stepped in to help us out! With the funds provided by the fellowship, we were able to remove a modern dump from the lower terrace which had destroyed the later periods of occupation before excavations had even begun at Kınık Höyük. Our hope was to uncover stratigraphy pre-dating the Achaemenid occupational phases in order to reconstruct a diachronic sequence for the 1st millennium lower town. What we ended up discovering, however, was just as interesting and very, very exciting for me personally.
Area D: Phase of the new sounding dating to the Old Assyrian Colony period.
From the first week of excavating in the new area, we began to recover ceramics from disturbed contexts dating to Early and Middle Iron Ages and comparable to types found just inside the western citadel walls (Operation C). What we didn’t expect to find, however, were ceramics dating to the Middle and Early Bronze Ages, including fragments of Anatolian metallic ware jugs (mid-third millennium). Having just completed my dissertation on Middle Bronze Age Anatolia, it was amazing to finally (after 5 years!) have my two research worlds collide in the most unexpected way. Of particular importance is a complete, red-slipped drinking cup recovered from a secure floor context that is identical to examples found in the MBA levels at central Anatolian sites like Acemhöyük and Kültepe. After spending the last few years researching and writing my dissertation on Kültepe, I was blown away to find the same type of material at Kınık Höyük where I had been digging away (happily…) in the Achaemenid period for so long. These discoveries are incredibly important for the site as a whole as we now know that Kınık Höyük was not only occupied during the third and early second millennia, but that it constituted a main center with a lower town that was keyed into trade and production across the entire region. We will now have to adjust our future excavation strategy to address new research questions generated by this season’s finds.
The highlight of this season, however, was our end-of-campaign tour and picnic on the last Friday evening of excavation. Many of the men and women from the two local towns, Altunhisar and Yeşilyurt, who work with us (some since 2010 when the project started) came out with their families and friends to hear a site tour in Turkish, offer their own perspectives on their work, and to partake in a delicious feast of lentil soup, lamb, rice and sweets on the lower terrace. It was wonderful to meet everyone’s extended families and to see the site come alive in a different way (and at a much more comfortable temperature). It was a fitting end to a great season that opened up a lot of new possibilities for the site as both a place for the team’s own research but also as site of public education and interest. The future (and the Bronze Age) is looking bright!
Nancy Highcock is a recent PhD in Ancient Near Eastern and Egyptian Studies at New York University. She is now starting her new position as a Postdoctoral Research Associate as part of the “Memories for Life: Materiality and Memory of Ancient Near Eastern inscribed private objects” project at the McDonald Institute for Archaeology, Cambridge University.
