Environmental Studies

One of the test trenches excavated across a street in 2004, TT 24, was partially reopened and extended in order to experiment with ways of recovering environmental evidence. In 2004 it was found that considerable amounts of (domestic) rubbish, containing animal bones and charred plant remains had been dumped on the street surface.

The animal bone is generally in poor condition which, combined with the hardness of the soil when dry, made recovery of easily measurable fragments both difficult and timeconsuming. It was concluded that wetting the soil before excavation makes bone extraction easier with very significantly less breakage. Experiments with simple floatation, using a series of buckets, produced seeds and charcoal whilst wet sieving the residue permitted the extraction of small bones and bone fragments.

The material recovered is now being studied at METU by Dr. Vicky Ioannidou. Excavation across streets in future seasons will have the recovery of similar environmental material built into the research design.

Anatolian Iron Age Pottery Project

Professors Lisa Kealhofer and Peter Grave took more than 100 samples from Iron Age pottery sherds for destructive analysis in Australia. This was done as part of a five-year study of Iron Age Pottery from Central and Western Turkey.

Dendrochronology

Many samples of charred wood from the Monumental Entrance were wrapped for export to Cornell University where they will be studied by Prof. Peter Kuniholm and his team. Most of the pieces are, however, quite small and it may well turn out that few if any have a sufficient number of preserved rings to be of use.