Archaeology in Turkey: The American Contribution (Part 1)

·        Illustrations are taken from the internet, unless otherwise noted.

·        For an earlier publication on this subject, see:  Charles Gates, "American Archaeologists in Turkey: Intellectual and Social Dimensions," Journal of the American Studies Association of Turkey 4 (1996):  47-68.

Let me start with an anniversary.  Fifty years ago this summer, I first set foot in Turkey.  I had just finished my sophomore year, my second year in college; I had changed my major to Archaeology; and I was in Beirut, enrolled in the summer school at the American University of Beirut.  Mid-summer, I flew to Istanbul for one week, to see what it was like. I had never before met a Turkish person, as far as I know; I couldn’t say “evet” or “hayır;” and I stayed in a dreadful hotel in Eminönü – I remember having to prop up the window with a book -- but I had a wonderful week, nonetheless.  I could never have imagined, though, that Turkey would one day become my home, and that I would take my place in a long line of Americans active in archaeological research in this country.

(Photo: author)

It is about these American archaeologists that I would like to speak this evening.  Who were they?   Why did they come here?  What did they accomplish?  I can’t mention each and every name, but I would like to give a sampling, to show the diverse interests and approaches American scholars have had, and to identify some notable contributions that American archaeologists have made to the study of the ancient cultures of this country.

I should state here that I will concentrate on work done within the borders of today’s Turkish Republic, with only passing reference to research in adjacent areas once held by the Ottoman Empire. 

American archaeologists in Turkey before World War I 

The first American project was at Assos, in northwestern Turkey.  From 1881 to 1883, Architects Joseph Clarke and Francis Bacon conducted excavations here, on behalf of the Archaeological Institute of America.  1881 – a date easy for us to remember, because that’s the year Atatürk was born.  The photographer for the expedition was John Henry Haynes, whose important career in Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, long forgotten, has been rediscovered in recent years by Robert Ousterhout. 

For a first foray into Classical archaeology, Assos seems a surprising choice.  It was a remote town that figured little in ancient history.  But the interest of Clarke and Bacon was Greek architecture, and Assos contains an early and unusual temple of Athena, ca. 540-520 BC, spectacularly located on a hilltop overlooking the Aegean and the island of Lesbos/Mitilini.  In a region dominated by the Ionic order of Greek architecture, this temple is a surprise: it’s built in the Doric order; it has sculpted metopes, also a Doric trait; but it also has a frieze above the columns, which is relief sculpture in the Ionic manner.  The finds from these years are divided between the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, and the Louvre.  

The intellectual background

 Why this choice?  And why explore ancient remains at all?  To answer these questions, let’s have a look at the larger intellectual background of the 19th century. 

Scientific archaeology began in Turkey in the second half of the 19th century under the influence of European scholarship.  Coloring this was a long-standing interest in the ancient Greeks and Romans.  Classical culture had been known throughout the Middle Ages, of course, with Latin as the liturgical language of Western Christianity and as the common language of educated people.  From the Renaissance on, Roman and indeed all Classical culture continued to be valued for its moral and political authority.  As a result, Latin especially, but also Greek were widely studied, even in Protestant areas, well into the 20th century. 

In addition to the long-standing interest in ancient literature, chance finds of Roman sculpture during the Italian Renaissance contributed to the growing fascination with the material remains of antiquity.  One thinks especially of “Laocoon and his sons,” the dramatic Hellenistic-Roman statue group discovered in Rome in 1506.  Collections of Classical objects were formed; and at Pompeii, organized explorations began in 1748 and have continued to the present day.  

The influence of Greek texts reminds us of Heinrich Schliemann, a rich German businessman, who, fascinated by the ancient stories of the Trojan War, set out to prove their veracity.  Led to the site of Hisarlık by Frank Calvert, a member of an expatriate British business family in Çanakkale, Schliemann began excavations there in 1871 and achieved spectacular results.  I wonder, can we claim him as an American archaeologist?  He had obtained US citizenship by this point, and Calvert did serve as an honorary US consul.  But this might be a bit of a stretch.

Back to our larger picture.  The Ottoman Empire controlled lands once key provinces of ancient Greek and Roman civilization.  Because of restrictions and rigors of travel, visitors from Western Europe were few before the later 18th century.  When European travellers did make the trip and report on their findings, the impact was tremendous.  Italy was long familiar to westerners, but now the specifically Greek component of the Classical world was being revealed.

In the 19th century, European travellers continued to describe ancient sites in Anatolia, and make drawings of the monuments.  In addition, they often took objects away, actual examples of Classical art, whether or not official permits were granted.  Ottoman authorities had paid scant attention to such activities.  This is not surprising, for the Latin and Greek languages and Classical cultures naturally enough did not feature in the Islamic-oriented education of Ottoman officials or resonate in their daily lives.  Only with the quickening of interest in European culture from the 1850s on did the Ottoman intelligentsia develop along with Europeans a curiosity toward the antiquities of their lands.

Sultan Abdulmejid and his son-in-law Fethi Ahmet Pasha began a collection of antiquities in 1845, the basis for the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul.  With the appointment in 1881 – again, our fateful year of 1881 -- of Osman Hamdi Bey as director, the museum moved into a new era of expansion and activity, culminating in the opening of the present museum building in 1891.  Laws regulating archaeological activities were issued first in 1874, then revised in 1884. This last set, which included a prohibition on the export of antiquities, continued in effect with minor revisions until 1973.

To return to the exploration of Assos:  What was the immediate American context for these excavations?  In the United States, the institutional framework for the study of archaeology, Classical and other, was being put into place at this very time.  The Archeological Institute of America was founded in 1879.  Although its interests were global, the Mediterranean basin would eventually become its focus.  The two major research centers for Classical Studies were soon to come: The American School of Classical Studies at Athens (founded in 1881) and the “American School of Classical Studies” in Rome, in 1895, eventually to become the American Academy in Rome.

Note that Istanbul, although a major historical center in the larger southeastern European region, was not yet an important center for research into Classical or any other branch of antiquity.

Other Old World civilizations well represented within the territory of the Ottoman Empire were also much studied, by Americans as well as others. Texts were always the key, just as Greek and Latin texts had fueled interest in Classical cultures.  The Bible stimulated archaeological exploration in Palestine.  Indeed, in 1899, the AIA founded the American School of Oriental Study and Research in Palestine, eventually to become the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR).  In Iraq and Syria, the decipherment, in the mid to late 19th century, of Akkadian and Sumerian allowed a deeper understanding of Mesopotamian cultures.  Although the the rediscovery of the Hittites grew out of an interest in the Biblical world and the Ancient Near East, French and then German explorations at Boğazköy/ Hattusa, the Hittite capital, were given new impetus by the decipherment of the Hittite language in the early 20th century.  And in Egypt, whose ancient writing system was deciphered in the early 19th century, the study of texts and well-preserved architecture and art was well advanced by World War I.  Each of these areas would become a specialized field of study.

After Assos, the next American project in today’s Turkey was at Sardis, where Howard Crosby Butler of Princeton University, directed excavations from 1910-1914, at the invitation of Osman Hamdi Bey.   Butler, an architectural historian, had already investigated Late Roman sites in Syria.  Although Sardis was a major city in the Roman Empire, its earlier history was well known from Herodotus and other ancient writers.  During the Iron Age Sardis was the capital of the Lydian kingdom.  The Lydians were a native Anatolian people, even if much influenced by their Greek neighbors and subjects.  Butler’s aim was to get information about the contribution of such non-Greek Near Eastern peoples to Classical art and architecture.  But as it so happened, his work focused on exposing the huge Hellenistic-Roman Temple of Artemis, as well as over 1000 tombs in nearby cliffs.  The project was stopped by the outbreak of World War I.  Butler returned briefly in 1922, but died later that year.  American research at Sardis would not resume until 1958.

Between the two World Wars

After World War I, new excavations on Greco-Roman sites were begun by American teams: short-lived projects at Colophon, in the Aegean coastal territory briefly occupied by Greece, and at Pisidian Antioch, near Yalvaç; and a major campaign in the 1930s at Antioch-on-the-Orontes (today’s Antakya), then in the French-occupied Sanjak of Alexandretta, under the sponsorship of Princeton University.  

The aim of this last project was to reveal the city of Antioch, one of the four great cities of the Roman Empire, from Hellenistic to medieval times.  This goal was believed possible because in the 1930s, ancient Antioch was overlain by only a small modern city – unlike Rome or Constantinople/Istanbul.  It quickly became clear that very deep silt deposits from the Orontes River concealed the ancient city.  Quick and satisfying results were thus difficult to obtain. In the end, after the villas of suburban Daphne began yielding one fine mosaic after another, the excavators made a virtue of necessity and, giving up on the vast deep soundings, concentrated on the mosaics.  Some of these spectacular mosaics are on display in the Antakya Archaeological Museum, in the Louvre, and, in the United States, in museums at Princeton, Baltimore, and Worcester, MA. 

The inter-war period was particularly notable, though, for the American entry into the prehistoric and pre-Classical field.  

At Troy, Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati, taking a break from his prolific research in Greece, excavated from 1932 to 1938, supplementing the earlier findings of Schliemann and his assistant and successor, Wilhelm Dörpfeld.  The Library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and one of the main libraries at the University of Cincinnati are named in his honor. 

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago was founded in 1919 – yes, this great research center is celebrating its centennial this year – founded by the Egyptologist James Breasted with financing from John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to promote research into the cultures of the Ancient Near East and Egypt.  The Institute sponsored teams that conducted important surveys in central Anatolia and excavations at Alişar Höyük (near Yozgat) under the direction of a German archaeologist and adventurer, Hans Henning von der Osten, and in the Amuq Plain, northeast of Antakya, by Robert Braidwood.  

In 1935, Hetty Goldman, soon to be appointed professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, began excavations at Gözlü Kule, the prehistoric settlement at Tarsus.  The results proved seminal for the understanding of Bronze and Iron Age cultures in Anatolia.  Goldman, first at Colophon in 1922, then at Tarsus, was the first American woman to direct an archaeological excavation in Turkey.  Much credit must to to Bryn Mawr, Goldman’s alma mater, the small but distinguished women’s college whose perennially strong programs in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology have encouraged many to enter the field.   The Tarsus excavations were carried out from 1935 to 1938, with two post-war seasons in 1947 and 1948.  As we shall see, those post-war seasons included staff members who would go on to direct their own excavation projects in the 1950s and beyond. 

By 1939, German archaeological research in Turkey was active and influential.  In 1929, the German Archaeological Institute had established a center in Istanbul to further its research projects.  The large projects at Pergamon, Miletos, and Boğazköy/Hattusha – to which we might add (in the German-speaking world) the Austrian excavations at Ephesus, which began in 1895 -- had already uncovered much and published well.  In addition, Istanbul and Ankara Universities were organized on German models.  

The relation with Germany had another dimension as well, one that would affect the United States.  In 1933, the Nazi regime expelled Jewish academics.  Many of these scholars, together with non-Jewish dissidents, would be welcomed in Turkey and given university appointments in Istanbul and Ankara.  Among them was Hittitologist Hans Güterbock, who joined the staff of Ankara University.  Like many, he began by lecturing in German with translation into Turkish, but eventually was able to give the lectures himself in Turkish.  After the war, this community dispersed, some leaving voluntarily, others the victims of a nationalist reaction in 1948 that led to the dismissal of these foreign professors.  Several eventually found positions in the United States.  Güterbock, for example, after a short stint in Sweden, was hired by the Oriental Institute.  He would eventually serve as ARIT president from 1969 to 1977, and remained a dedicated board member for many years beyond.