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| Me, working |
The world we live in is so
fascinating and exciting that it is full of memories and traces of past
societies. As soon as the new season has started, I realized again that I have
an amazing job. This season started for me when I participated to the Labraunda
Survey Project which is also directed by our beloved Instructor Olivier Henry.
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| Ayşe, teaching me how to survive in the forest |
Since 1994 (I wasn’t even born yet)
it is known that rock paintings around the Latmos region existed and thanks to
the Malkaya cave sondage and surface findings, these paintings are now dated to
the Late Neolithic and Early Chalcolithic periods which correspond to the 6th
and 5th millennia BC in Western Anatolia. These paintings were made
with red color mostly. Figures are showing male and female figures, animals and
some geometrical shapes. Especially human figures were made in two different
styles. In schematic style, figures have M shaped heads while they have circular
heads in naturalistic style. In the light of this research led by A. Peschlow
in the northern part of the Latmos, around Bafa Gölü, a new survey project
conducted by Olivier Henry and Ayşe Eyigör around the village of Sarıkaya
village (Milas, Muğla) since 3 years uncovered identical paintings, 30 km
south! These Sarıkaya rock painting are a part of Ayşe’s Phd thesis. She is
looking for a certain pattern for the rock choices of the society in the
landscape.
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| A male and a female figure |
It is a fact that these rock
paintings are striking and this was a completely new area for me to work on
since I only worked on Classical Archaeology so far. So, I did not know much
things about these paintings at first. On the first day, it was like a tour for
me to learn which rocks have paintings on them, what we will do in this season,
how I can climb on these rocks despite the fact that I am a very short person
and how I can survive in the forest if I ever get lost (Thanks to Ayşe, she is
a real survivor!). When the first day passed I was almost ready to
start, almost! The only problem was that while some paintings are so red and
easy to see, some others are unfortunately faded due to weather conditions and
time and I had a very hard time to see those faded pigment traces and shapes on
the rocks. But everyone was so encouraging and telling me “You will see! Don’t
worry”. And so it happened. I saw them, and when you learn how to see these
paintings you can never unsee them!!
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| Me, drawing the rock complex |
A survey is not always about walking around
and finding new things. As I said on my previous blog entry, documentation is
also a huge part of the job. So, what I did was (except the times Ayşe and I
could not help wondering and check almost every cave and rock surface to find new
pigments traces) drawing the general view of the rocks and caves and putting
the figures I could see on the surface on my drawing. As I said, it
is not so easy to see the paintings all the time. So sometimes I was taking an
advantage of the sun and using a reflector and sometimes I was wetting the
surface with deionized water to make the figures more visible without hurting
them. In addition to drawing them, we were taking lots of pictures of course as
a part of documentation process. These photographs were also very useful to
find new pigment traces. There is a computer program called DStretch. It allows
us to apply different filters to photographs and make pigments more visible. While recording everything we saw, we were also making guesses on what
these paintings are telling us. Since we were dealing with a period without any
writing system, it was really hard to tell what was really going on these
scenes but during our lovely lunch times with Ayşe, we shared many ideas and
discussed many possibilities.
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| Before and After DStretch |
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| My precious drawing of a rock |
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| Ayşe and me, in the rock shelter |
Milas is very rainy in the beginning
of June and I learned it the hard way. When the sky is full of clouds, not letting
any sunshine to brighten our day, it is very hard to see the figures on the
rock surface. In one of those days, Ayşe and I decided to walk around, search
for other paintings. As we went deeper in the forest, we took pictures of
almost every rock to look at them later on DStretch. At the same time, Zeus was
obviously getting angry for some reason and we could hear thunders. When the
rain came, we realized we had gone too far in the forest and it was impossible
to go back without a strike of lightning. So we found a rock shelter and waited
for the rain to stop. After a while when Zeus started to feel more
relaxed, we decided to visit the Sarıkaya village. One more fact about the
survey: local people are a very huge part of the survey. They are not only
giving you a shelter and a hot/cold beverage, but they are also telling you
more about the region you might have missed out.
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| A local woman |
After 2 weeks, I left Labraunda
with lots of good memories (of course!!) and I learned a lot about Neolithic
and Chalcolithic cultures. In addition to these, after spending one year in the
city, I remembered how beautiful the nature is again when I came Labraunda and
I can’t wait to come back in August to work with the coolest metal team in the
excavation. I’ll keep you guys updated!
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