Domuztepe dig diary
Week two: opening up
British Museum curator Alexandra Fletcher reports from Domuztepe
The working week starts on a Saturday, as Friday is a day off and we employ people from several nearby villages to help with the excavation. This week we worked hard to open up a new area for excavation, a large trench covering 400m2.
At first the topsoil was a mixture of ancient and more recent objects, but by the end of the week stone walls were beginning to show. Elsewhere, in older trenches, we have now reached some of the earliest remains yet found and are finding beautifully painted pottery as a result.
The weather has been very hot, about 40˚C, and
none of the 
trenches have shade. We start work as the sun rises
at 06.00. By mid-morning the whole site is covered by a shimmering
heat haze and members of the dig team are thickly plastered with
sun cream. Excavation stops at 13.00 to avoid the hottest part of
the day. As it becomes cooler in the late afternoon, we start work
again in camp to clean and record objects.
At the end of the week we were glad to see the British Museum conservation team arrive and we made an important visit to the local museum in Kahramanmaraş. The building is being extended and we have been offered more display space and a new storeroom for the artefacts from Domuztepe. It is very exciting that we will now be able to move out of our current storage facility into somewhere much better.
Read more about the Domuztepe research project
Images (from top):
- A new area of excavation is opened up
- Balancing precariously to take a photograph of the trench