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.
Images (from top):
- A new area of excavation is opened up
- Balancing precariously to take a photograph
of the trench