McMahon works with two students cleaning baulks in the Byzantine level on the top of the mound.

CIE Travel Report: Gregory McMahon

Gregory McMahon, associate professor of history, received one of the 2004-05 CIE Faculty International Travel Grants funded by the VPAA to travel to Turkey to support his research about the Hittites. Below is his report.

In July I traveled to central Anatolia (Turkey), to a small village where I have lived most summers for the past decade. The village is called Peyniryemez, which is Turkish for “the one that doesn’t eat cheese,” and I have enjoyed over the years the comical range of folk etymologies provided by the villagers to explain this rather unusual toponym. Here in this village is the dig house for the Çad¦r Höyük Excavation, an archaeological project for which I serve as associate director. We’ve been coming to this village since 1994, so our arrival is a real homecoming, as we greet friends and fellow workers with whom we have created very heartfelt and productive friendships, which in Turkey are an essential aspect of working relationships.

Çad⁄r Höyük from Çaltepe, a small mountain across the river valley, which McMahon believes to be a sacred cult site associated with the city being excavated on the mound.

McMahon (left) stands with with Excavation Director Ronald Gorny and friend Cengiz, who owns the tourist hotel at Bogazköy, site of the Hittite capital. McMahon first stayed at Cengiz's hotel in 1982, on his first trip to Bogazköy.

Our project involves the excavation of a large höyük, or occupation mound, about ten minutes walk from the dig house. There we have painstakingly and methodically been exposing the archaeological strata left by five thousand years of continuous occupation at this site. Many archaeological sites in Turkey are mounds, built up by hundreds and hundreds of years of occupation and building in the same location, so that a city, which began on the plain, after millennia of rebuilding, will be located 20 meters or more above the level of the countryside. We began the project primarily in search of the Hittites, a Late Bronze Age people who dominated the central Anatolian plateau from their capital at Hattusa, less than two hours drive from us. Our search has been rewarded; there were in fact Hittites at our site, as is evident from Hittite pottery coming up in several different places on the mound. What we did not expect when we opened our first trench in 1994 was that everybody else would also be there, beginning in the Chalcolithic period around 4000 B.C.E., and continuing all the way to the middle of the Byzantine era, in the 11th century C.E.

Because my interest remains firmly rooted in the Late Bronze Age, I have always worked in the step trench on the south side of the mound, where Hittite materials are closest to the surface. This year I spent my season in a trench opened last year by a colleague, looking specifically for evidence of a large-scale temple whose existence we only began to suspect at the beginning of this year’s season. Although I didn’t find the temple, my student assistants did in one morning find more pieces of Hittite spindle bottles, a very distinctive type of Hittite cultic pottery, than a much larger neighboring site yielded in six years of excavation. Finding the temple’s foundations would have been more exciting, but at least now we know that we should keep looking, since this pottery only occurs in a temple context.

This year’s excavation season was especially productive because for the first time we ran a field school, in which students from a number of universities enrolled in a program to learn archaeology in the field, through excavation experience. That meant that I had a series of student assistants whom I was teaching to dig while we worked in our trench. Since some facility in the local language is an essential component of successful archaeology, I also taught a class in Turkish in the afternoons. In addition, I had the chance to lead the students on a tour of Hattusa, the spectacular capital city of the Hittites, where we explored monumental architecture and Hittite relief carving, and observed the first large scale restoration of a mud brick building in Turkey.

This productive season of research and teaching was made possible in part by a CIE Travel Grant. I am deeply grateful for the CIE for recognizing the importance of travel for scholars who must work overseas, and for helping make it possible for me not only to uncover more Hittites, but to guide potential archaeologists in the wonders of revealing the past.