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New Professors Unearth History in Turkey
by Megan Hockley
Elmali, Turkey, an agricultural community, features a
15th-century mosque and open-air markets. Many of the women walking down
the street with covered heads. The "county seat" of a rural
area, Elmali is a fair-sized country town that Pedar Foss, classical
studies professor, calls conservative.
"It is surprisingly similar to Greencastle," he said.
Foss and wife Rebecca Schindler, also a classical studies professor, spent
the summer in Elmali working on an archeological excavation before moving
to Greencastle as the newest members of DePauw's classical studies
department. Last year they taught archaelogy at Stanford University.
"[Greencastle] is a neat place and a strong community," Foss
said. "Hopefully, we won't have to move again for a while."
Schindler and Foss have worked to excavate in an area of southwestern
Turkey called Lycia for the past three years.
"This is an area that has not been well excavated," Schindler
said. "We don't know too much about the history of Lycia. One of the
goals of the project is to build a chronological picture of this region
... of the people who lived there over a 5,000-year period."
At this point, the workers are concentrating on excavating a
"mound" 40-feet high and three football fields in diameter. Over
time, humans living in the area have built the mound, according to Foss.
Schindler's job was to dig in the dirt. She is especially interested in
understanding what was going on the early Iron Age, around 1000-500 B.C.
"This was the time leading up to the great Persian wars with Greece
... we're not sure who controlled this area, but whoever was there was in
contact with both [Greece and Persia]," Schindler said.
Some of the most interesting finds of the summer were a Greek Orthodox
Church from the ninth and 10th centuries and a gold coin.
The coin was found eight feet from the surface of the earth. From symbols
on the coin, researchers discovered that it was made in Athens in 407 B.C.
"Athens didn't normally mint gold coins ... [They were] usually
silver," Schindler said. She went on to explain that the coin was
made during the Pelopennesian War. During that time, the Athenians were so
desperate for funds that they melted down the gold and silver offerings in
the city's temples and shrines.
"This is as rare an ancient coin as could be found," Foss said.
Foss headed up a survey walking team that scoured the countryside trying
to find new sites outside the mound. The team walked seven or eight miles
a day and made several discoveries over the summer.
"We found an entire town we didn't know existed, six Roman roads, at
least three farmsteads and a couple of cemeteries," he said.
The team is careful to map everything with the Global Positioning System,
which uses satellite technology. Foss said that most of the technology
used is cutting edge.
Schindler uses computer-aided design software to draw their finds that are
recorded carefully.
"When you dig, you destroy if you don't replace what was there with
information," Foss said. "You get one shot in archeology. You
have to be careful about recording everything."
Luckily, disastrous earthquakes that shook Turkey in August did not
disturb the excavation site in Lycia, located 400 miles south of Izmit.
The death toll nears 17,000 with thousands of people still missing,
according to a report on CNN.com. Tens of thousands were injured.
"It knocked out the power in all of Turkey and phone service was
interrupted," Schindler said. "More disturbingly, several of the
Turkish students and staff on the dig had relatives who were killed."
Although away from Turkey, their connection to the project is far from
over.
"We'll never understand the whole thing, but the project will
hopefully go on for nine or 10 years," Foss said.
Later this month they will be present their work, which will be open to
campus. Other plans include publishing their work interactively on the
World Wide Web, according to Foss.
The couple will return to Turkey every summer to continue working with the
project and will take two DePauw students each year to assist them. Foss
said the trip will not be limited to students in classics courses, as
archaeology is interdisciplinary by nature.
"Archeology is really a diverse discipline and you have to look at
things from so many angles, using different techniques, from different
perspectives," Foss said. "When you're an archeologist, you're a
detective ... the picture you're trying to reconstruct is so colorful and
so surprising. You never know what you're going to find. Archeology forces
you to ask a lot of questions and only provides partial answers. That's
what makes it tantalizing."
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