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September 2018 FRIENDS OF GORDION NEWSLETTER Figure 1: Moving the conserved stones of the Early Phrygian East Gate (9th c. B.C.) back to their original position. Photo by Brian Rose. The 2018 season at Gordion was an was also continued, with the assistance Our research this summer yielded extremely successful one in terms of of high school history teachers from a new understanding of the Phrygian both conservation and excavation, in the neighboring town of Polatlı. The fortifications of the citadel between that we completed our reconstruction latter project was part of our expanded the 9th and 4th centuries B.C., as well of the Early Phrygian Citadel Gate and Gordion Cultural Heritage Educational as new information regarding major investigated three different areas along Program which has been ongoing since changes to the city plan during the same the central spine of the Citadel Mound. 2014, and which seeks to educate both period. This year nearly forty scholars Conservation of the enormous Early schoolchildren and the general public and scientists worked in five different Phrygian pebble mosaic (9th c. B.C.), about the importance of safeguarding sectors of the site and its environs during the first of its kind as far as we know, the ancient landscape of Gordion. June, July, and the first half of August, 1 Friends of Gordion Newsletter Figure 2: The restored South Bastion of the Early Phrygian East Gate, after the last row of conserved stones had been put in place. Photo by Gebhard Bieg. and we continued to enjoy a very 1950s revealed a wide corridor with reinserting them once they had been beneficial relationship with the Museum two flanking stone bastions. The conserved. This phase of the project was of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. central passageway, measuring nearly completed this year, and you can see the 9 m in width and 23 m in length, is upper section of the gate’s restored face Architectural Conservation unusually large by comparison to those in fig. 2. and Restoration of contemporary citadels. Above the Nearly all of these were the original battered or inclined stone walls there stones that were lifted during the As many of you know, we have must have been an additional story of dismantling process; only nine were had the good fortune of excavating at mudbrick, which probably raised the total new blocks added to replace irreparably Gordion since 1950, revealing a wide height of the gate to approximately 16 m. damaged originals or missing masonry, range of discoveries and monuments In terms of size, construction technique, especially along the upper rows of that span nearly four millennia. The and state of preservation, Gordion’s the bastion’s northwest corner. The most prominent of these is the “Early East Citadel Gate is unique among the reconstruction was carried out with the Phrygian Citadel Gate,” which provided ancient monuments of Turkey. aid of a mobile telescopic crane that access to the citadel’s eastern enclosure. After the gate was seriously damaged lifted the blocks from our scaffolding to It still stands to a height of 10 m and is by an earthquake in 1999, the Turkish their original position (fig. 3). the best-preserved gate complex so far Ministry of Culture and Tourism asked Behind the conserved facing stones known from Iron Age Anatolia (9th c. us to develop a program for emergency we inserted stone rubble embedded in B.C.; figs. 1-5, 7). Since we have recently intervention. Supervised by Elisa Del lime mortar, while micro-injections of excavated a second citadel gate on the Bono and Angelo Lanza, this five-year grout stabilized the fractured blocks mound’s south side (the South Gate in project was designed to consolidate the left in place. To further improve the Area 1), we will now refer to the Early damaged stones of the gate. That meant stability of the reconstructed stones, Phrygian Citadel Gate as the “East removing the upper twelve courses of 2.5 m long stainless-steel straps were Gate.” stones that had sustained the greatest installed to anchor the facing stones to The excavation of this gate in the damage, 112 blocks in total, and the core of the wall (fig. 4). The final 2 September 2018 row of reconstructed stones was lifted into place at the beginning of August, so the lofty bastion once again rises to its original preserved height. The stones of the East Gate had been laid in discernible courses, but with considerable variation in the height of the stones in each row. Smaller “chinking” stones had been slipped into the resulting interstices to create a smooth face, all of which would have been camouflaged originally by a layer of mud plaster. Many of the smaller stones have fallen in a succession of earthquakes during the last 2800 years, so repointing was an essential component of the conservation project (fig. 5). This will be completed next year, at which time we will place a protective “green” cap with shallow- Figure 3: The crane lifting the restored blocks of the Early Phrygian East Gate from the scaffold- rooted plants on the restored bastion and ing to their original position. Photo by Gebhard Bieg. remove the scaffolding. This project has been both difficult and time-consuming, and its successful completion is due to the phenomenal skills and diligence of the architectural conservation team: Elisa Del Bono, Angelo Lanza, Giuseppe Bomba, and Renzo Durante, assisted by Mehmetcan Soyluoğlu, Ali Can Kırcaali, and Emre Uzundağ. We were able to inaugurate the project due to the generous support we received from the J.M. Kaplan Fund, the Merops Foundation, the C.K. Williams II Foundation, the Selz Foundation, and the U.S. Department of State/American Embassy in Ankara. It is difficult to find the words to thank them adequately. Object Conservation Figure 4: Installing the stainless-steel straps that anchor the facing stones of the Early Phrygian East Gate to the core of the wall. Photo by Gebhard Bieg. Gordion’s object conservation was supervised by Jessica Johnson treatment of the 33 pebble mosaic excavated, and it features a series of and Cricket Harbeck, assisted by panels from one of the most prominent polychromatic geometric designs that Jessica Abel, H. İbrahim Dural, and megarons on the citadel (Megaron 2, most likely echo the kinds of textiles Emre Uzundağ. About a third of the ca. 825 B.C.; fig. 6). This is the earliest that would have been produced in the department’s time was devoted to the pebble mosaic floor that has ever been adjacent Terrace Building Complex. 3 Friends of Gordion Newsletter reduced by brushing and vacuuming, followed by a gentle cleaning with sponges and tap water. This season, the conservation team completed ten panels and conducted preliminary work on six others. With the help of Elisa Del Bono and Angelo Lanza, we also began to develop a new grout using a custom-made resin/sand mixture. It is anticipated that work will continue for the next two seasons, after which the mosaic will be newly installed in Gordion’s site museum, which will be significantly expanded within the next few years. Excavation: The South Gate in Area 1 One of our most important objectives is a better understanding of Gordion’s city plan; in particular, we’re attempting to reconstruct the ancient road system as a way of understanding the physical links among the various administrative, industrial, and residential districts. This has involved extensive use of remote sensing, especially magnetometry and electric resistivity tomography (ERT), which allows us to detect subsurface features such as walls and streets within Figure 5: Repointing the wall face of the Early Phrygian East Gate’s South Bastion. a depth of ca. 8 m. Photo by Brian Rose. Remote sensing cannot answer all of an archaeologist’s questions, however, From what we can tell, this type of formulate new strategies to ensure the especially when we are dealing with a highly decorative floor was invented preservation of the panels. complex series of layered settlements in Gordion in the second half of the Work on the mosaic has been such as one finds at Gordion. There are ninth century, and then spread to areas continuous since detailed condition times when only excavation can clarify under Assyrian control approximately a assessments were made in 2010 by the the construction history of a building century later, during the reign of Midas. Penn Architectural Conservation Lab or district, and this is the case with The best-preserved sections of the team. The primary goals of the 2018 the overall plan of the Citadel Mound. mosaic were cut from the original floor season were to reattach loose pebbles and Young assumed that a sizeable road seven years after its excavation, then improve the appearance of the mosaic sliced through the center of the mound set in concrete with rebar backing, and patterns by removing concrete over- from north to south, thereby dividing ultimately exhibited in the Gordion grout, algae, and general soiling. The it into two elevated parts or enclosed Museum in 1983. Such treatment concrete was removed mechanically with complexes (the “Eastern” and “Western” of an artifact would be anathema to fine chisels, scalpels, and dental tools, Mounds). The existence of this street conservators today, and we needed to while surface dirt and incrustations were has become generally accepted, even 4 September 2018 Figure 6: Conservation of the Early Phrygian (9th c. B.C.) pebble mosaic in the Gordion Museum. Photo by Brian Rose. though the evidence for it was very The first of these (Area 1) has been The initial construction in the Early fragmentary, so we decided to make its under investigation since 2013, and has Phrygian period, ca.

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