Program Description

This archaeological survey project will focus on the largely undocumented and unexplored Gulf of Iskenderun (Hatay, Turkey), where the Cilician plain narrows to fifteen kilometers and combines three topographic features: seacoast, plain, and mountains. Cilicia, the largest plain in the eastern Mediterranean, functioned for millennia as an interface in the cultural and economic exchange between Aegean and coastal centers in the West and the interior empires of Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia in the East. This region, a favorite haunt of pirates, has formed part of the Hittite, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Armenian, Crusader, and Ottoman empires.

Our fieldwork goals include the creation of an inventory of archaeological sites in the Issos and Iskenderun Bay coastal plains and a comprehensive database that documents natural and human-generated features of the landscape. The students will be trained and will participate in intensive archaeological surveys in selected landscapes, analyses of satellite and aerial photos, geomorphological studies, and GIS mapping.

Field trips to nearby archaeological sites, museums, and historic cities, such as Antioch, will be led by the project directors or Turkish archaeologists and scholars.

Accommodations: The expedition will reside at the Casa di Preghiera e di Spiritualità "Madonna Assunta" in the mountain resort of Güzelyayla. The rooms will be dormitory-style accommodations with two students per room.