Picturing a Long-Gone Citadel

In the Late Bronze Age, the walls of the citadel at Kaymakçı rose 10 feet above the jagged bedrock surrounding it. Behind the fortification was a community of homes, workshops, roads, plazas, and great halls. The neighboring residences and cemeteries surrounding the citadel sprawled across 60 acres—larger than the site of Troy, the ancient city celebrated in The Iliad.

And then they were gone.

Chris Roosevelt, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of archaeology, and Christina Luke, a senior lecturer in the archaeology department and the CAS Writing Program, are leading a team of archaeologists who are trying to learn what life was like at Kaymakçı, and why the largest known Middle to Late Bronze Age (2000 to 1200 BC) site in western Anatolia (current-day Turkey) was abandoned. The archaeologists are studying items ranging from pottery to seeds to the teeth of animals that lived in the area, and they hope to reconstruct the site with help from computer-enhanced photographs.

Roosevelt and Luke have spent the past 10 summers exploring the second millennium BC site and its greater environs in the Marmara Lake basin. Working on foot and with drones, their team has found six fortified citadels, the largest of which, Kaymakçı, was the focus of this summer’s excavation.

“We believe Kaymakçı was the political powerhouse in the area,” Luke says. “The site was a very big, bustling city, and then it collapsed. No one knows why, but there were periods of large-scale fire. And then no one went back there to live. From an archaeological perspective, that’s fantastic, because otherwise we would have to weed through the layers of everyone who lived on top of the site afterward. We have in Kaymakçı what is called a pristine site.”

While they have yet to find proof of a written language at Kaymakçı, Roosevelt and Luke believe it was the capital city of a vassal kingdom mentioned in ancient Anatolian Hittite texts, whose archives describe a royal marriage with a king from the “Seha River Land,” the kingdom those at Kaymakçı probably ruled over. Luke says other written records suggest that the politically astute kings living at Kaymakçı would shift alliances frequently, not unlike the kings and chieftains in Game of Thrones.

A Stone-Lined Pit

• 1 This stone-lined pit could have stored at least four metric tons of wheat, enough to feed about 12 people for a year. Ongoing analysis of plant remains recovered from it will determine whether it was used as a granary.
• 2 A small stone figurine representing an Anatolian “mother goddess” found near here shows the deity’s possible importance in household activities.
• 3 Analysis of soil-chemistry samples taken from preserved sections of this room’s floor will help to reveal what it was used for—for example, cooking or craft production.
• 4 A flask believed to hold liquids for drinking was found in the midst of accumulated sediments here.

The Kaymakçı Archaeological Project is, in fact, just one part of the duo’s larger Gygaia Projects, a multifaceted initiative to preserve the ancestral cultures and natural environments of western Turkey’s Marmara Lake basin. Their work is partially funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Gygaia Projects strives to educate local residents and to explore the geopolitical, economic, ritual, and social intricacies of the site, such as how the residents of Kaymakçı got along with the neighboring Hittite and Mycenaean people.

The BU-based team worked this past summer with more than 60 archaeologists from universities in the United States, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. Some collected oral histories from the locals, while others made plans for an education center that will one day teach visitors about the site. Team members took turns writing about the dig on the Gygaia Projects blog when they weren’t out in the field.

This summer’s work in Kaymakçı yielded 55,000 fragments of pottery, as well as a bronze knife, loom weights, broaches, tools, animal bones, and marble idols. The archaeologists say uncommon objects such as the knife and the tools suggest that the site was home to a prosperous people. All of the artifacts were digitally recorded and scanned into a database, the 21st-century archaeologist’s most important tool.

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