Day 1 - 11th August 2024

The first day on site of our campaign for 2024 passed off surprisingly well. With the help of Omer and the team of architects from Bilkent we established grids across our two areas, on the south side of the Lower Agora and on the western flank of the southern half of the Colonnaded Street. We aim in both sections to excavate parts of a row of late antique shops along with adjacent stretches of sidewalk and portico. Each area has something to tell us of the chronology of different parts of the street, revealed by work in the previous two years on patterns of architectural reuse. We are seeking to pin down the dates of large scale rebuilding works along the main avenue in late antiquity whist also adding to knowledge of urban retail during the 4th-6th c., when colonnaded cellular shops were especially popular in the region.

I arrived on site having had only one hour of rest, coming on a delayed flight from London, back ended from a mammoth trip from Saigon. I haven’t slept properly for three days and was initially disoriented, but the excitement of being back at Sagalassos soon overcame me, as I began to organise our camp and our tools. After an hour or so of indecision, we made a start: suitcases and boxes came down from the museum onto the colonnaded street and we began to sort equipment from the UK by task group, and work out what was needed. A heavy pagoda, lugged by Francis Leung from Canterbury was set up as the office, despite gusts of wind that made all nervous. In the end it was secured and weighted, in the shelter of a side street, under a heavy 4th c. wall. We nicknamed it ‘The Tychaion’ due to its resemblance to the civic temple of the city’s civic goddess, and it became the seat of Lucky Luke, in a play on the name Tyche.

The excavations could now begin, after photogrammetry mapped surface blocks. A stone store from the lower agora need to be moved from Trench 1, which a huge crane dully carried out, expertly handled by our Turkish workmen. Devegetation and deturfing could begin, as trenches were laid out with orange string and waterproof labels fixed us within the grid. All this took place against the hot sunshine and breathtaking mountain views that define Sagalassos, as tea break and lunch led into an afternoon of impressive progress. As I have little time this year, we are working with a double team of 8 workmen and 1 supervisor, who are all old hands, quite apart from the academic team of 7 and our 3 students.

Trench 1

Trench 2

Soon the features of the shops of T1 became clear, as real trowel cleaning began: a thick boundary wall for the shops, full of distinctive spolia types and clear threshold blocks, already discovered in the 1990s. We picked up an early excavation trench, probably from 1994, which will complicate our task but also started to see floor slabs and a late water supply cutting through the wall. In T2 the stripping of turf took longer to get going. We had some thinking to do about exactly where to place the trenches, in a mixed are of monumental buidings and retail facilities that may not contain all of what we need. We await a geophysical print out but for now have decided on a general stripping of grass to see if the tops of walls can be revealed to plan further. A good stretch of the portico is at least coming to light. Striking progress for only one day, so let’s see it we can keep it up. Check in on us tomorrow, as we start to get full stratigraphic excavation open on both sites.

Simon and the team in Trench 1

The threshold of the shops, discovered in the early 1990s