One thing has already been stated in a earlier chapter about our excavations within the Bronze Age ranges at Beycesultan. We’ve got described one big, “half-timber” constructing; a residential palace over 2 hundred toes sq. and administrative buildings overlaying an space of virtually two and 1 / 4 acres, which we took to show that the truth is, in the course of the Center Bronze Age, the walled metropolis at Beycesultan was a state capital of Arzawa. However what’s extra related for the second to the side of mound excavation which we’re contemplating is the way wherein we contrived to make this mound a stratigraphical key to the entire prehistory of western Anatolia. For, beneath the Center Bronze Age public buildings we lower a large sounding by means of the sooner occupations all the way down to an earliest settlement on the clear earth beneath.
As we descended degree by degree, one noticed how ultimately the amorphous proof supplied by Mellaart’s west Anatolian survey was crystallising into an articulate sample, based mostly on this new chronological sequence. Not solely had been we figuring out successive occupations of the mound and noting their traits, however for every occupation a ready-made distribution map may now be equipped, exhibiting the geographical extent and character of the fabric tradition which corresponded to it. Actually one could declare that the report on this sounding is in a way distinctive.1 For, along with an unusually detailed document of the ceramic sequence all through the third and fourth millennia B.C., ten maps are printed, exhibiting the distribution of every class of pottery at any one of many main chronological durations.
Prehistoric sounding at Beycesultan
However this prehistoric sounding at Beycesultan can also be attention-grabbing within the current context for the illustrations which it supplies of eccentricities in mound formation. Allow us to first take into account the curious form into which it developed. Town seems to have stood on the crossing of an vital freeway over the Meander river; or quite over a department of that river which is now dry. In an air-photograph the traditional river-bed can clearly be seen winding across the foot of the mound on the south-east aspect. So the hill itself, which stands seventy-five toes excessive, has two separate summits and a saddle between, over which a cart-track nonetheless passes. Our sounding at first took the type of a fifteen-foot trench lower into the japanese flank of the west summit, going through in direction of the central despair. Because it grew deeper, an eastward extension was made within the type of a really slender passage by means of which the earth may very well be extracted in wheelbarrows.
Private Balkan Tours 