Farm Works Assists Survey Exploration in Ancient Turkey

By Nicholas Rauh and Larry Theller

Every summer since 1996 an international team of archaeologists and students has assembled on the south coast of Turkey in the town of Gazipasha to explore the archaeological remains of a remote region historically known as Rough Cilicia. This season (2001) Farm Works Inc. is assisting the project by furnishing the team with its Farm Site Mate program. Use of Farm Works Site Mate program and pocket PC computers will enable team members to increase spatial data acquisition exponentially over previous years, when hundreds of artefacts were located and surveyed by hand and all data was entered into notebooks by hand.

This field season, in addition, essential records such as locations of digital photographs and video clips will also be recorded and exported to a GIS using the Scouting program. Through the winter of 2000 the authors brought together satellite images, terrain maps, and surveyed location data to create a geographic information system (GIS) for the entire survey area. This GIS will be the heart of this years field operations, and in essence, the Farm Site Mate program will furnish the central nervous system to the team’s field operations in this difficult, high-altitude terrain. Previously mapped artefacts can now be quickly located in the rough underbrush using Site Mate’s ability to load multiple shape files as background, and navigate to those features. Trying to index 300 pottery shards, for example, as hand-entered way points would quickly surpass the capacity of the low-cost handheld GPS units being employed by the students, and the inevitable mis-entered way points would consume precious time to identify. Loading a shape file that has already been prioritised in a GIS is a vast improvement.

“The Site Mate program is the perfect answer to our need for a robust program to be used by fairly inexperienced students. The ease of use we encountered when using Site Mate for teaching in a beginning GIS/GPS course at Purdue University made it the clear choice for this project;” says Larry Theller, GIS coordinator for the survey project.

Directed by Professor Nicholas Rauh of Purdue University, and funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and participating universities, the 25 student and Ph.D. participants of Rough Cilicia Archaeological Survey Project have been authorized by the Turkish Ministry of Culture to explore the archaeological remains of this vast, rugged, and largely unexplored region. Ranging systematically across the landscape, team members collect and record surface data obtained primarily from shattered remains of pottery, architecture, and land-use terracing as these are encountered in the terrain. During the past five seasons the survey team has explored more than 150 square kilometres of Cilician countryside. Apart from mapping the remains of several important urban sites, such as Selinus and Antioch on the Kragos, team members have identified more than sixty previously unknown Greco-Roman villages, hamlets, farm households, tombs, and various other areas of past human activity, including pottery kilns and wine and olive oil production centres.

In Summer 2000, the team surveyed an inland canyon, known the Has Dere, where two ancient urban sites (Lamos and Asar Tepe) were previously identified, and discovered with four new sites (Govan, Tomak, Gocuk, and the fortifications atop Bozkaya). At Gocuk, they encountered dense sherd scatters, a rock-cut tomb, a ruined bath complex, and an inscribed statue base that identifies the ancient settlement as the “lost” Roman colony of Juliosebaste (the subject of the team’s first on-line publication—see below).

To collect data during the 2001 season the team will employ Farm Works Site Mate program with 4 sets of hand-held computers attached to hand-held GPS units. The Site Mate program and the low-cost GPS units will enable team members to assign spatial locations and descriptive attributes to architectural and ceramics remains as these are encountered in the field, and to export collected data as shape files that can quickly be mapped in the GIS stored in the project PC at team headquarters. To insure the highest possible degree of accuracy, team members will tie their survey paths (located with the hand-held GPS devices) to points at Sokkia Locus III differential GPS units (furnished by Hickerson Instruments Co. of Indianapolis IN) that remain stationery in the field throughout the day

To recover field data capable of evaluating the region’s archaeological history, the team has employed a fairly consistent set of field methodologies depending on the character of the terrain under investigation. The primary role of systematic surface survey is to locate, to describe, and to analyse all sites within a selected region and to correlate this data with corroborating evidence of land utilization in the surrounding and intervening landscape. Sites of all periods within the surveyed regions are recorded and described in order to reconstruct patterns of long-term social change and to contextualize any given social system by reference to systems preceding and following it. At urban and large rural settlements with significant surface remains the team employs relatively intensive and time-consuming methods of ceramic and architectural data collection. In previously unexplored rural terrain, however, team members opt for a less intensive “course interval” methodology that enables them to find and to identify site locations rapidly over extended tracts of terrain.

The evidence collected thus far suggests that the survey region became inhabited by the 7th century BC, reached its peak during the early Roman Era (First to Third Centuries AD), and declined dramatically following the Arab invasions of 650AD. Interested parties can watch the progress of the July-August 2001 season of the Rough Cilicia Survey at the project website: http://pasture.ecn.purdue.edu/~rauhn/summer2001/progresspage.htm. To read about the discovery of Juliosebaste, see http://pasture.ecn.purdue.edu/~rauhn/