Days Janissaries

It was at the corner of a street, its gate wide opened, and there was only one big old tree in the garden. The others must have died of old age, and the owner must have been too poor to replace them.

The road we followed was dusty and almost deserted, with deep furrows left by chariots, carts and carriages since the beginning of time. In winter the rain and the snow turned the soft, pinkish Anatolian soil into a greasy mud. And every winter, ever since the days of the Janissaries, chariots, carts and carriages had passed on these roads, furrowing always deeper. One felt as if the clock of time had stopped here years ago. An acute sense of the living past permeated everything.

On our way my wife asked me to tell her something of my aunt’s family. Our surroundings reminded me of old stories, and I told her the story as told to us by my grandmother when we were tiny little boys. I used to love it as it opened before my mind vast visions of heroic ages. “Centuries ago,” I told my wife, “There lived a young man, almost a boy, in the faraway mountains of Anatolia, bordering the snow-covered peaks of the Caucasus.

Almighty heard

He was tall and handsome but did not marry because he had to support his old father and mother who were so old and so poor that they could only sit on their divans all day and pray the Almighty to call them back to him so that their boy might be left free of worries and responsibilities. But they were good parents and the boy was a good son. Therefore, the Almighty heard their prayer and freed their son of all worries, but not in the way the old people had prayed for. It so happened that the “Frank” kings of Hungary, Servia and Bulgaria declared war on our powerful Sultan and invaded his domains. To repulse the invaders our Sultan called all his brave subjects under arms.

They flocked from all over to the standard of their emperor. The young boy from the Anatolian mountains near the Caucasus heard his sovereign’s call and answered it immediately. But he was so far away that when he came to Adrianople, which was at that time the capital of the Sultan, he found that the armies had left many days before to meet the detested foes. He galloped post haste through the Balkans, days and nights without rest until he finally reached the plains of Kosovo.

Deductive reasoning

Both his technical procedure and the pattern of his subsequent deductive reasoning will be governed by a constant and unvarying code of rules, applicable only to this form of excavation. Equally it can be maintained that many of these rules are inapplicable elsewhere, and, what is more important, that technical precepts which have rightly come to be indispensable in other forms of excavating, may prove totally unsuitable to this very specialized form of practice.

If one may be more explicit: to suppose that a graduate in archaeology, because he has experience of excavating an Iron Age farm on Salisbury Plain or a Roman villa in Tuscany, is thereby equipped to tackle a Mesopotamian mound, is to court disaster of the sort which even the most verbose archaeological report can never quite adequately disguise.

Now, in expressing this opinion, one is immediately conscious of venturing upon controversial ground; for, in the slightly parochial world of

British archaeological technicians, there is a school of thought which maintains the exact opposite. At present, this includes some who are both great scholars and great excavators; giants of the archaeological profession, whose opinions can never safely be ignored. But in almost every case, their early training has been in the field of Roman Britain.

Their central loyalty has always been to the code of ethics and procedure created at the end of the last century by General Pitt Rivers; and the theme of their teaching was the rigid discipline in archaeological practice, which they themselves have done so much to perfect. Their influence on the training of potential field workers in this country has been prodigiously effective, and there is little in their teaching, which one does not admire.

Whole ritual of method

In my own mind the only doubt, which arises, is when they maintain that the whole ritual of method or as one might call it, the “procedural liturgy” which they have advocated, can be applied wholesale to any excavation in any part of the world.

However, already it will have become evident that the primary purpose of the chapters, which follow, will be to make this point clear, by summarizing the conclusions to be drawn from thirty years practical experience of mound excavation. Their intention in fact is to prove that this is a specialized form of archaeology, which requires specialized training.

First, therefore, it will be necessary to present what seem to be the most relevant facts regarding the anatomical character of mounds in general. After that, it should be possible to illustrate some of the peculiarities, which emerge, and the problems, which they present, by practical instances from actual excavations. In addition, in attempting this, it may be logical and even desirable to restrict myself for the most part to excavations, which I myself have directed or with which I have been in close contact.