Event place performance

Event place performance:
towards an archaeological field project on Hittite and Early Iron age
rock reliefs, sacred springs and other meaningful places in Turkey

Ömür Harmansah
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University

In the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in Anatolia (ca 1600-800 BC), Hittites, Assyrians and post-Hittite regional states marked their landscapes with rock-carved monuments and sacred pool complexes. Such rupestral monuments and cultic establishments often feature monumental inscriptions, imperial pictorial imagery and sometimes architectural complexes. These sites have so far been studied solely from the point of view of historical geography, using art-historical methodologies and philological interests, and interpreted as imperial interventions into the countryside. In a field project projected to start in Summer 2009, we plan to investigate such sites in the context of their surrounding cultural landscape and settlement system. Our preliminary reconnaissance trip in South Central Anatolia suggests that several of these sites are built on top of abundant springs, along narrow river gorges, at caved river sources or sink holes, therefore usually associated with some extraordinary karstic/fluvial geological formation. Scholars have correlated such sites with the so-called DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR (lit. “Divine Road of the Earth”) of Hittite and Hurrian texts, understood as powerful god-filled places where humans could interact with the underground world of dead ancestors. These sites were also presented as witnesses to treaty-signing events among different polities. A case study of the Assyrian Source of the Tigris river (Tigris Tunnel) monuments, north of Diyarbakir, suggests that such sites were always already symbolically charged places, cultivated by local social practices, and were then appropriated by state spectacles and building activities. In this field project, we will focus on the concepts of the social event and cultural performance (ranging from everyday practices to state spectacles), and investigate the formation of places as dense loci of human practice from a phenomenological perspective. This cultural phenomenon will also be investigated through carrying out what I would like to call an “ethnography and ethnohistory of landscapes.” In this talk, I wish to lay out the theoretical framework of the project, discuss methodological problems in approaching such a historical problem and present the preliminary results of related research in preparation for the first field season.