TIME EUROPE
DECEMBER 6, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 23
ARCHAEOLOGY: EVER NEARER THE PAST
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Part of the great Byzantine palace built by Emperor Constantine was discovered by Alpay Pasinli, director of Istanbul's Archaeological Museum, around the corner from his office--in the exercise yard of a former prison now converted into the luxury Four Seasons Hotel. What remains are vast corridors and narrow state rooms dating to perhaps the 6th century A.D., with colorful frescoes.
At Gobekli Tepe, Hauptmann and his crew, led by field director Klaus Schmidt--as well as his Turkish partners at the Urfa Museum--seek to solve an older mystery. They are working to understand the pre-pottery society that existed there some 10,000 years ago, says Angela von den Driesch, a professor of zoology at Munich University, and "to determine the exact moment of the transition from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalist." What prompted these ancient people to spearhead mankind's first revolution--the so-called Neolithic miracle--turning from the upland forests that had long provided sustenance to the very beginnings of lowland settlement and agriculture, the domestication of plants and animals? "Humans always react to problems and catastrophic events," says von den Driesch. "They are survivors, and adversity is usually a catalyst for change." Perhaps, she suggests, climatic shifts at the time gave them no choice.
The climate in Turkey is still changing today--politically and demographically--and some land, villages and archaeological sites in the southeast are being transformed into lakes. More than 38% of Turkey's energy needs in 1998 were met by hydroelectric power, followed by coal and gas. The energy situation may ease in the future, when broader geopolitical squabbles over gas pipelines from the Caucasus and Central Asia are resolved.
For now, though, Turkey is harnessing the power of its mightiest river, the Euphrates, and its Mesopotamian sister, the Tigris, in the massive 22-dam Southeast Anatolia Project (G.A.P.). While the G.A.P. has brought undeniable benefits to Turkey's long-neglected southeast, the lakes have destroyed some archaeological sites and barely explored ancient cities--though nothing truly extraordinary, most scientists agree. Among those gone is Samosata, once a Roman fortress along the upper Euphrates. It now lies under 120 m of water trapped behind the huge Ataturk Dam 20 km downriver. Nevali Cori was submerged a year later by the Ataturk project. Hauptmann is confident, however, that the most valuable artifacts, including cult statues found hidden and preserved inside stone benches, were retrieved.
Some 100 km farther down the Euphrates and about 60 km east of the city of Gazientep, the Birecik Dam is under construction. When the dam eventually goes into operation, it will drown Zeugma under a 40-m-deep lake. With it will vanish a nearby early Bronze Age burial site, on the right bank of the Euphrates, that France's Abadie-Reynal says is "probably the richest necropolis in the whole area." In it are the westernmost Syriac inscriptions ever found. A Turkish team from the Gazientep Museum excavated 400 limestone tombs, recovering not just bones but jewelry, vases and other objects. Abadie-Reynal believes there could be as many as 3,000 tombs at the 5,000-year-old site. No one will ever know for sure. A construction crane has clawed at the arid ground, now off-limits to archaeologists, loosening earth that has been hauled away to help fill the Birecik Dam. What of the tombs? "The stones will stay and be submerged," says Abadie-Reynal.
Elements of past civilizations are also being lost in a more sinister and less public way. Turkey is so rich in antique remains that it is the victim of some of the greatest art thefts on earth. Perhaps billions of dollars worth of archaeological treasure disappears annually into private collections and is rarely ever recovered. "We can't even estimate it," says Bilkent University's Gates. "It is a very big business." Often, she says, farmers come upon objects, or know about excavations near where they live. "The rewards can be so big and the risk of punishment so small that many people will take the chance." But when cultural objects end up in wealthy, private hands as objets d'art or collectibles, "they've lost their value as a piece of data--the minute they're removed from the site at which they're found."
Legal purchases by museums can also be harmful, according to Muscarella of the Metropolitan in New York. He believes that Turkey has been too generous in this regard and that "the country is still being plundered," adding: "There are orders from museums all over the world for Turkish antiquities. The U.S., Germany, Britain and Japan are the main destroyers of these precious historical time capsules. An antique object on a wooden stand in a foreign museum is forever out of context."
For modern archaeologists with no interest in plunder, however, Turkey is "a great country to work in," thanks to the government's generosity toward foreign scholars, says Muscarella. Turkey has long been used to multiethnicity and welcomed outside expertise, notes Hauptmann. As Engin Ozgen, a former chief of the Ministry of Culture's Antiquities Service, explains: "Turkey is an open-air museum, and we want to share our rich heritage with the rest of the world ... We want to preserve our riches for future generations and these foreign countries are helping us do just that." All foreign excavations are carried out in partnership with the ministry, and loose objects are promptly transported to the nearest museum.
Still, Gates believes, mutual benefit to state and collector could result if some objects that are not unique--such as mass quantities of plates--were sold to help fund research and improve museums. "There's a human element at play," she acknowledges. "Intact objects are kept for museums, even if they're plentiful." A human element is surely what gets people interested in the past in the first place, and what keeps all the projects going. The scientists' work, says Roger Matthews, director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, is about "filling out the picture of human existence" and the record of that development is "highly biased in favor of things that survive--the rubbish left behind."
To extend the limits of what today's scientists can understand about the far-distant past--its cultures, its great events, its historical cycles, its infinite mysteries--and to put it all in a coherent context, archaeologists are combining old tools with new. Along with shovels, picks, chisels and brushes, they are using computer models, DNA analysis, remote sensory equipment, underwater gear, satellite photography and a host of high-tech gadgetry. Cutting-edge genetic science, for example, can provide data on how bodies in graves are related to each other, or the nutrition problems experienced in centuries-old societies, while marine archaeology can shed light on ancient trade routes.
"In this kind of work," says Hauptmann, "we come nearer the people before us. The art helps, and the sculpture." Gazing at the field of flint at Gobekli Tepe--and looking back 10,000 years--the German scientist notes the dryness of the surface stone and its unsuitability for toolmaking. The ancient hunter-gatherers, he postulates, probably mined flint containing water from the limestone bedrock, then heated it to make their tools. This, Hauptmann adds, was quite a sophisticated technique. "In this period, mankind learned to deal with different materials for the first time. It was a real revolution in technology--a step forward, a step to new ways of life."
Some things, though, will never be known. "Without writing, there is no proof. We have to hypothesize," says Toni Cross, director of the Ankara branch of the American Research Institute in Turkey. "It's impossible to try to interpret [ancient societies] without bringing in your own cultural heritage. We assume they were more superstitious and that this permeated their lives." Notes Britain's Matthews: "From a social point of view, it's interesting to see what laws existed, the social patterns, what their relevance is today, the variety of ways that humans can live. It adds a new dimension." Belgian archaeologist Waelkens shares the sentiment as he trudges up a steep mountainside at Sagalassos. His dream is simply put, though not very easy to realize: "To record everything that happened here for the past 10,000 years." Marking three decades of excavation in Turkey, he says: "I told my father when I was six that I would be an archaeologist working in Turkey ... Sagalassos is my wife, my child, my life."
Erica Friedland, a graduate architect from New York, has also been captivated by the magic of an excavation. On her first dig--at Aphrodisias--she sketched stones for eight weeks, nine hours a day, under a blazing sun. Why? "Because I shall never forget jogging at dawn around that ancient stadium with the sun rising up from behind distant Babadag Mountain and turning the marble first blue, then rose." Havva Avci, a restorer at the Ankara museum, understands the feeling. Avci, who worked on the extraordinary paintings and other treasures of Catalhoyuk, recalls: "While we restored the city plan we knew that we were touching distant limits of history."
Across Turkey--and some day in China's Yangtze and India's Indus Valleys, where scientists believe equally remarkable discoveries lie in wait--ancient peoples are indeed, paradoxically, being drawn nearer as time recedes. As the puzzles of their lives and their societies are painstakingly pieced together, one fact becomes increasingly clear: the past is not such a foreign country after all.
With reporting by James Wilde/Arslentepe
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