Excavations at Zeugma Conducted by Oxford Archaeology ed. by William Aylward (review)

These three volumes constitute the final publication of a large portion of the rescue excavations carried out at Zeugma, Turkey, in 2000. The project was initiated by David W. Packard and funded by the Packard Humanities Institute, of which Packard is president, after he read a newspaper article about the flooding of the site in the spring of that year. Five million dollars were spent on three months of excavation and a program of conservation, which dealt also with mosaics that had been excavated earlier by the Gaziantep museum. The work, organized at extremely short notice, was conducted by a Turkish team from the Gaziantep Museum, a French team from the University of Nantes (these two groups were already working at the site), a team from the commercial archaeological firm Oxford Archaeology, which was hired especially for the project, and an Italian conservation team from the Centro di Conservazione Archeolgica, which continued work on the mosaics until 2004. The post-excavation processing was taken on by William Aylward, who is the editor of this publication. Aylward notes that negotiations between the various parties to produce a complete publication of the 2000 excavations failed, with the result that the Turkish and French teams have published their finds separately and this publication covers only 13 of the 19 trenches excavated in that year (ix). An initial publication was made in Zeugma: Interim Reports in 2003, which contains an overview of the finds made by the British and Turkish excavators and a selection of the French finds.¹ This publication presents mainly the finds from the excavations made by Oxford Archaeology.

The short notice allowed for little time to plan. The first action taken was to divide the site into three areas: A, B, and C, based on where the eventual high water level would be; A was to be submerged, C (constituting about 65 percent of the site) left dry, and B was the area of the water’s edge, most vulnerable to damage through wave action (which is where the rescue excavations focused). Although Aylward references these zones and directs the reader to Plates 1 and 2, they are shown in neither of these images (Figure 2 of the Interim Reports usefully maps them out, in addition to showing which teams were responsible for which trenches; this figure could have been included in the work under review) (3). Chapter 1 of Volume 1 (Aylward) describes the excavations and the political and cultural history of Zeugma, founded as two towns (Seleucia and Apamea) by Seleukos I at a strategic crossing point on the Euphrates. Chapter 2 (Nardi and Schneider) is focused on conservation efforts undertaken during the rescue excavations, on a varied group of objects from small finds to painted wall plaster and mosaics. Not everything could be removed, and the mosaics and painted plaster left in place required special protection, which was achieved by coating them in a “5-cm-thick protective coating of removable hydraulic mortar” followed by reburial (63). Once the reservoir had filled, consolidation and maintenance was undertaken along the new shoreline, which was maintained (at a cost of $20,000 per year) by the Italian team between 2000 and 2004, but apparently has not been continued (68–69).

In Chapter 3, Jennifer Tobin discusses the houses, including an overview of the finds made in them. The organization of the chapter is somewhat confusing. The trenches excavated in 2000 were numbered from 1 to 19, presumably in the order in which they were opened. As a result, the numbers do not indicate the spatial relationship of the trenches. Whereas in the Interim Reports, the trenches were discussed in topographic order from west to east, Tobin begins instead in the east and then proceeds to the west in an unclear order. Beginning at 10, the description skips west three trenches to 2, then returns to 4. There is no list of trenches or table of contents...