This year’s Boncuklu excavation is now well under way with our international team of 37 diggers continuing work to understand life 10,000 years ago at the mound. Graced by the new entry sign, provided by the Karatay Belediye Başkan, the site and dighouse are a hive of industry. Excavation is […]
Fingerprints at Boncuklu
We have a new expert on site – Dr Lori Hager, who arrived a few days ago. Her specialty is studying ancient fingerprints, so we’re very excited to have her joining our team. Even archaeologists sometimes forget that every artifact we find was made by an actual person! So finding […]
Building 1 gets a roof
Continuing from last week’s blog post, we can now report that Replica building 1 is almost complete. Having dried in the hot summer sun for 2 days, Abdullah Usta and team (see main image) added the roof beams and wall plaster before adding the reed roof. The gallery shows the […]
Update from the trenches: August 16
As well as developing new visitor facilities and an electronic recording system, work is of course in full swing across Boncuklu’s excavation trenches with our multi-national team working hard under a hot summer sun to uncover the site’s history. In Area L (above) the search continues for the edge of the […]
Boncuklu’s buildings rise from the earth
Professor Ofer Bar Yosef and Dr Gökhan Mustafaoğlu discuss how to reconstruct the roof over the Boncuklu visitor centre’s new replica Neolithic building. In a matter of a few days the walls rose from nothing to around 1.8m high, built by Abdullah-Usta and his team of builders. The first building […]
A sea of mudbricks
West of Hayiroglu village a sea of mudbricks is drying in the sun that we will use to re-create the buildings of ancient Boncuklu. Based on archaeological finds and experiments carried out last week by Steve Chaddock, 1000 bricks are being mixed and shaped by hand. The bricks are made from […]
Auroch for dinner anyone?
Caroline Middleton, one of the faunal analysis team at Boncuklu, is shown here in the lab doing preliminary work on one of the most interesting finds of the 2013 excavation season – a bone-rich deposit from Area P containing wild cattle and pig. It is unusual to find such large fragments […]
View through the lens of time
Another layer of the interpretation was delivered this week. From inside the visitor centre building the large window which allows people to see the excavation mound has been updated with installation of an illustration by cartoonist Peter Carnavas on transparent film. Careful planning of the building’s location and positioning of […]
FAIMS in a box: E-recording comes to Boncuklu
Archaeology involves recording a lot of information about the site and its finds. These records form the basis of our analysis and the long term archive which can be used by future generations to understand our finds. At Boncuklu we use a single context recording system in which every archaeological entity […]
Come digging in 2014: Applications due by November 8!
Applications to participate in the Boncuklu 2014 excavation season due November 8! The Boncuklu Project is now recruiting its dig team for 2014. Students and other interested parties can apply for participation in the following ways: Apply to a fee-paying residential field school for university credit through the Institute of Field Research, contact […]