More on Mopsos

What a very strange couple of weeks it has been. I'm now on my second project for the summer and have actually been here for a week and a half. Wow. Let me say it again, I'm REALLY crappy at this blogging thing. Let's rewind to my first project (Mopsos) and then I'll spring ahead to what I am doing now.

When I last wrote I had just given you a list of the main players I had been working with on the Mopsos Project. Two people who I tragically left out but without whom we would not have been able to accomplish anything are, Muge and Evren. This dynamic duo are students (Well alumni in Muge's case as she graduated last month), at Bilkent University in Ankara. This school is particularly cool because not only is it known to have the best archaeological department in Turkey, but the whole school's curriculum (Every department for Undergrad, Graduate, MA, PhD etc) is taught in English. So both speak English extremely well, and of course Turkish.

I need to interject for a moment. It should be known that the "theme" of my time here in Turkey besides being about archaeology, has been about technological difficulties (This will make sense as I continue my narrative). We now resume your very delayed update.

The monastery that was our home base, is located in a small village called Guzelyayla, in the hills over looking the Bay of Iskenderun as well as the city the Bay is named for. Those first four to five days upon arriving in Turkey, however, were spent getting an introduction at blazing speed of GIS and what the Mopsos project was all about, not our location.

(View from the monastery at dawn for pottery washing. More on that later, but you can just make out the bay and the city in the distance, through the fog, to the left of the picture.)

So, I actually did not set foot outside the monastery until our Turkish Ministry Representative joined us. The Rep is key to keep projects running because all foreign archaeological excavations/projects have to be supervised by a Rep from the Turkish government, and no fieldwork can begin until two things happen: 1) the Rep gives us the thumbs up and 2) all foreign participants get a residency permit.

Us foreigners on the project were working under research permits (As opposed to tourist permits) and because we're also in Turkey for an extended period of time we had to register with the regional police department in Antakya, to get our residency permits. So the day after our Rep arrived we made the trek to Antakya. There we gave the police copies of our passports and our address at the monastery, so they could find us just in case***. Once we got all of our paper work sorted out, the following day we were able to start the fieldwork.

Fieldwork days (Which were just about everyday) went like this:
4:15-4:45 AM Wake up
5:00 AM On the van to head out to the field
6:00-6:30 AM Depending on how far we had to travel begin fieldwork
9:00 AM Breakfast
1:00-1:30 PM Stop fieldwork and head back to the monastery
2:00-2:30 Lunch time
Free time til 4:30 PM
4:30-7:00 PM GIS lesson or landscape archaeology lecture or pottery washing/sorting/labeling/cataloging
7:00 PM Dinner time
Free time the rest of the evening/paperwork catch up time.

As I mentioned probably three times before, surveying for our project involved two primary forms of data collection: Coordinates taken for mapping and surface collection of pottery. To take coordinates we used hand-held GPS units, and primarily (in theory) a total station unit. A total station is a device that allows you to do two things: give you "real world coordinates" of you location (this is opposed to creating your own grid system to find your location on a map), as well as measure topography. Okay, I think I'm getting too technical. You know those guys in construction companies who wander highways with one guy looking through a device mounted on a tripod, at another guy x number of feet away with a pole to take measurements? That's a total station.

The problem with ours however was just about EVERYTHING. The total station was rented here in Turkey, but as Prof Hritz was going to be the one operating the machine we asked for it to be programmed in English. It came in Turkish. Then it would miscalculate coordinates. Then it would say were were in the southern hemisphere when we obviously were not. So the first, oh, week was lost on the mapping side of things because the Total Station was cracked out.

It was eventually discovered, after a good two weeks of dealing with these problems, that the over lying problem that caused most of our troubles was that the device was programed in gradians. Turkey apparently has an extra 40 degrees that know one told us about.

We also had three computer system crashes, one virus contracted, one computer fry in a power surge(Mine FYI. RIP my Mac *tear*), an iPod crash (Mine, too), a flash drive stop working, and two cell phones blocked by the Turkish government (Oh yeah one of those were mine as well), just to give you an idea of some of the other technological problems the team incurred. The technology Gods have not been kind to us (of me) this trip.

On the pottery collection side, things went pretty smoothly so long as the GPS units were working (We started the month with five functional GPS' we ended the month with two). Working in pairs, once we were at an identified site (A place already listed as having archaeological remains), we would get a series of coordinates. Using the GPS units we would walk out to one of the corrdinates, then we would collect all the pottery/artifacts within 10 meters of our point. Later that pottery would be washed, dried, sorted, cataloged and labeled.

We did other types of collections and did more besides work but *sigh* another post that has gotten too long. To be continued.

Love,
~Abby~

***Which they did. Eight-ish days into the project two Doctors from the ministry of health hunted all the people that traveled on MY flight from JFK to Istanbul (Which included two of my fellow students and a Professor) to give us a five day dose of a Turkish Tamiflu equivalent. Some poor sole apparently flew in the same tin can as us and exposed us to Swine Flu.***