Cleaning the Hacımusalar Mound

In an effort to prepare the Hacimusalar Mound for archaeological research, we started cleaning the Mound from dense cover of shrubs and thorny plants. The Mound has five sectors; the Central Church, the West Church, the North Rim, the East Slope, and the South Slope.

All sectors were cleaned and the Mound was ready for high-resolution aerial photography thanks to the hard-working crew. In their efforts, our team members were extra careful not to harm any wildlife.

At the same time, the work at the Excavation House focused on preparing the living spaces and the depot.

Excavations at Hacımusalar Mound started!

In the summer of 2022, we have started the interdisciplinary archaeological research at Hacımusalar Mound in the SW Anatolian town of Elmali near Antalya. Hacımusalar is a mound (höyük in Turkish), which is a multi-period archaeological settlement in southwest Turkey. The mound is only 12 km to the town of Elmalı. Elmalı is about 100 km west of Antalya metropolitan city. It takes about 1,5 hrs to get to the excavation house at Elmalı from the International Airport at Antalya by car. Hacımusalar Mound measures 300x350 meters (approx. 10,5 ha) and rises 13 meters above the Plain. Elmalı Plain was visited by travelers in 19thcentury and the first systematic archaeological research on the Plain was conducted by MachteldJ. Mellink in 1960s.

The archaeological research at Hacımusalar Mound will focus on the past human – environment dynamics. The research team, led by Istanbul Technical University (ITU), will build an interdisciplinary field school that will reconstruct the past environmental conditions across the Plain through geology and geoarchaeology. Concurrently, the research on the Mound will focus on resource extraction, patterns of resource use, development of ancient technologies as well as changes in socio-economic development and organization at the site through time.

The ITU Field School at Elmalı aims to train undergraduate and graduate students from diverse but related fields to archaeology in field methods. Archaeological excavation is at the core of the field methods. There are nine complementing branches, each of which will be covered in the Field School by experts and academicians. This field school represents the new paradigm in archaeology where complex and inter-related human-environment dynamics will be assessed from a multitude of perspectives. In order to unravel the time-transgressive patterns in these dynamics, it is important to correlate human behavior in its natural context.

The ITU Field School will bring together experts and students for an intensive collaboration at the intersection of earth sciences and behavioral sciences. Wide variety of earth sciences methods to be employed to answer questions concerning human decision-making processes and natural processes will guide our assessments of cultural evolution. Training the new generation of researchers with interdisciplinary knowledge and perspective is imperative for sustaining the research on human-environment relationships. The ITU Field School will provide the ultimate environment where young researchers will be exposed to such diverse applications of scientific methods.

The archaeological research at Hacımusalar Mound will emphasize how past climatic and environmental conditions were across the Plain, how these conditions changed through time, to what extent anthropogenic impacts due to farming and herding were responsible for such environmental changes. Additionally, the new research will attempt to understand which resources human groups focused on and how these resources changed through time. Inter-regional demands as well as technological innovations may be responsible for these changes in resource use and extraction patterns.

2022 season has proven to be productive - important discoveries through geophysics

Following a lengthy cleaning work on the Mound, the application of different geophysical methods in certain sectors at Hacimusalar Mound has proven most productive.

We identified three critical sectors and in 2022 season, ground penetrating radar (GPR) and magnetic method were applied in these sectors. The first sector was the South Slope where Hellenistic/Roman walls were exposed. The second sector was the Central Church an the third was the North Slope.

The results of different geophysical methods show that there is much more at Hacimusalar than churches and defensive walls. We will continue geophysics survey on and around the Mound in the coming seasons!