With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Timothy Matney will lead an international research team to the Diyarbakir province of southeastern Turkey to conduct archaeological excavation and survey at the site of Ziyaret Tepe. Dr. Matney's team consists of senior collaborators from universities in the US, Britain, Germany, Finland, Denmark and Turkey. Ziyaret Tepe is located in the upper Tigris River valley, a rich agricultural zone which has produced some of the earliest evidence for cereal and animal domestication in the world. During the Late Bronze and Iron Ages (c. 1300 - 600 BC), this area was annexed by the kings of the Assyrian Empire, based in modern-day northern Iraq, who subsequently established large urban centers in the valley. A land of modest villages for millennia, the arrival of the Assyrian armies and colonists meant a radical transformation of the region. The establishment of Assyrians frontier cities, such as Ziyaret Tepe (ancient Tushhan), required the harnessing of significant resources such as timber, grain and human labor. In addition, Assyrian imperial demands from the homeland required large quantities of raw materials, especially timber and metal ore, to be transshipped from the upper Tigris River valley downstream to the Assyrian capital for consumption by royal building projects, the Assyrian bureaucracy and the imperial army. Matney's project aims to assess the impact of these demands on the geomorphology, paleoclimates and plant and animal communities in the upper Tigris River valley. His team includes an array of specialists (paleobotanists, faunal analysts, geomophologists, soil micromorphologists, etc.) who will collect and analyze the data from both the excavation of Ziyaret Tepe and a regional survey conducted within a 10km radius of the site. This is the first comprehensive geomorphological and archaeological survey to be conducted in this area and will benefit many of the research teams working in the area. Much of this portion of the upper Tigris River valley will be flooded by the construction of the Ilisu hydroelectric dam (completion scheduled for 2014), so the evidence gathered by Matney's team will salvage valuable information on the cultural heritage of the region before destruction of the ancient record by modern economic development schemes. The basic questions being addressed by Matney's study have implications well beyond the academic discipline of archaeology. The economic, ecological, social and political implications of imperial expansion and urbanization in the late second and early first millennia BC are relevant data points for discussions of modern phenomenon of globalization. The models developed and tested for the Ziyaret Tepe project will inform scholars across a range of disciplines on the long-term impact of urban lifeways and intensive resource utilization on localized climates, natural and human ecosystems.
