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When visitors to Gordion approach the entrance to the Early Phrygian fortified area or citadel, they are often puzzled by a massive pile of stones that stands just inside the towering walls of the gateway (Figs. 6.1, 6.2). If they examine this pile, they find that it is a large tank or Drain Basin with finished stone blocks lining its interior, and remnants of a stone-lined channel lead down into it from the north where the Early Phrygian Palace Quarter lay, its buildings preserved by a great fire that took place around 800 BC (Figs. 1.2, 6.3). This drainage system , which would have blocked access into the citadel , also presented a significant puzzle to its excavator, Rodney S. Young. He encountered the basin in 1953, his third season of excavation at Gordion, and he initially thought that it might date to the same period as the Early Phrygian Gate Building (1955:15, fig. 26). As he gained a better understanding of the archaeological remains inside the citadel walls, he assigned the basin’s construction to the rebuilding of Gordion after the fire, or to what we now call the Middle Phrygian period (Young 1956:258, 260, fig. 38) (Figs. 1.3, 6.3). The area inside the Early Phrygian Gate Building continued to present stratigraphic and chronological problems for Young, and he eventually created an “interim period” between Gordion’s destruction and reconstruction, in which he placed the drain system as well as other unspecified architectural anomalies (Young 1964:284; an oblique statement which was tied to the Drain Basin by DeVries 1990:n.28). After Young’s death, the puzzle began to be resolved . Keith DeVries, Young’s successor as Gordion Project Director, re-studied the Drain Basin while preparing a preliminary report on the 1969–1973 excavation seasons. On reading the excavation field records, DeVries found evidence that the Drain Basin (and thus the drainage system) was already in place at the time of the Early Phrygian destruction, and was actually one of a series of structural elements that he referred to collectively as the “unfinished final predestruction building project” (hereafter the Unfinished Project) (Fig. 6.4) (DeVries 1990:387–88, fig. 22).1 This dating presented an interpretive challenge, since it was not compatible with the history of the site as constructed by Young and accepted by his colleagues after his death in 1974 (Young 1981). Young used the few references to Gordion in documentary sources to construct a chronological framework for the site (Voigt 2009). He attributed the Early Phrygian destruction to Kimmerian nomads who raided the countryside as they traveled across Anatolia from the east in the early 7th century BC. But if the Unfinished Project was begun shortly before 700 BC (as DeVries thought in 1990), why did the Phrygians choose a moment when they were in peril to start a construction project that had opened a primary entrance into their citadel to anyone who walked by? Information gathered from excavations since 1988 has revised some of our ideas about the history of Gordion that are relevant to a consideration of the Unfinished Project. First, a deep stratigraphic sounding conducted in 1988–1989 indicated that only a brief period of time had elapsed between the fire and the beginning of the rebuilding process that resulted in Middle Phrygian Gordion, or Phase 5 6 The Unfinished Project of the Gordion Early Phrygian Destruction Level Mary M. Voigt 68 Fig. 6.1. Air view from 1989 showing Young’s Main Excavation Area on the eastern half of Yassıhöyük. Photo: Will and Eleanor Myers. THE UnfInIsHEd projECT of THE GordIon EarLy pHryGIan dEsTrUCTIon LEvEL 69 in the Yassıhöyük Stratigraphic Sequence or YHSS (Voigt 1994:275; 2005) (Table 6.1). With any significant gap between destruction and reconstruction eliminated, the Unfinished Project appears in an entirely new light: it no longer represents a minor modification of the Early Phrygian/YHSS 6A Palace Quarter, aborted and abandoned at the time of the fire, but is instead the first stage of what became the Middle Phrygian/YHSS 5 construction project, a project that was interrupted but not much delayed by the fire. Second, radiocarbon and dendrochronological determinations showed that the fire took place around 800 BC (DeVries et al. 2003; Rose and Darbyshire 2011). The Middle Phrygian/YHSS 5 reconstruction therefore took place in the early 8th century BC, when the Phrygians were at the height of their political...

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