Collaboration unearths ancient city of Sardis

From the Greeks and the Romans to the Ottoman empire, the history of Sardis, Turkey, is one of persistent turnover. But its archaeological investigation has been remarkably consistent. Since 1958, the ancient city has been continuously excavated by one of the longest-running institutional projects, the Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis.

“It’s really important that it has institutional continuity,” said Benjamin Anderson, associate professor of history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. “Many of us know and have been mentored by colleagues of the previous generation of excavators. As a result, it’s one of the few long-term archaeological projects in the region that has generated a critical mass of data.”

For the last several years, Anderson has been documenting the walls and structures of the city’s acropolis, which was a major part of the settlement in the Byzantine period, following Roman times.

“This is a city that shows up in lots of ancient historical sources,” he said. “But now, just in the last 75 years or so, we have the possibility of telling that story, also, through what the project has found archaeologically.”

This summer, thanks to the efforts of the project as well as the local community that has played a critical role in the excavation, the site was inscribed in the list of UNESCO World Heritage sites.

“The opportunity to really start understanding a culture through the material remains is pretty unusual, and it requires that kind of long-term commitment,” Anderson said. “That’s also what’s being celebrated by the World Heritage designation by UNESCO. This project has always been distinguished from the very beginning by a desire to communicate results and to make their work legible to tourists and to locals and all manner of different audiences.”

‘A really large-scale exploitation’

A capital of the Iron Age empire of Lydia, located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Anatolian plateau, Sardis was “a place of cultural encounter between the East and West,” according to Annetta Alexandridis, associate professor of the history of art and classics in A&S.

The Lydian period is of particular interest for archaeologists and historians. The Lydians are credited with the invention of coinage, and their ruler, King Croesus, was fabled to be the wealthiest man in the world. The Lydian empire was eventually conquered by Alexander the Great. Several centuries later, it was integrated into the Roman Empire, and then the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

“Because it was not overbuilt by a modern city—it’s only a little village—Sardis gives you a really long history, from the Bronze Age, third millennium BCE, to basically today,” Alexandridis said. “These layers are all there, and make it sometimes difficult to excavate, because they are not clearly stratified. They interfere with each other, but, in a way, it’s an ongoing history, and that makes it so fascinating for us.”

As associate director of the project, Alexandridis has been studying the city’s Roman funerary culture and is now conducting a survey of all its cemeteries, which so far have not been well-documented, unlike the Bin Tepe cemetery, about 10 kilometers north of Sardis, which features some of the largest tumuli—i.e., burial mounds—on record.

Sardis also played an important role in the development of American archaeology. The first modern attempt to exhume the city in the early 20th century, as led by the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, was “a really large-scale exploitation,” Alexandridis said.

The Temple of Artemis and the necropolis were excavated, but many artifacts were damaged, lost or ended up in the U.S. by dubious means, including a giant column that is still prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That initial excavation ceased with the Greco-Turkish war in the early 1920s. Slowly, over the decades, artifacts began to trickle back to Turkey.

“It’s one of the first cases where we can see the whole discussion about restitution of antiquities that were illegally exported, until some were returned to Turkey,” Alexandridis said. “It has all of these broader issues of how to deal with cultural heritage from a not only preservation or scholarly point of view, but also political and legal, and of the question of stewardship and responsibility for culture in the past.”

The collaboration between Cornell and Harvard originated in 1958 under the direction of Harvard’s George M. A. Hanfmann and Cornell’s Henry Detweiler from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, who specialized in the documentation of historical structures.

“If you went to Sardis in 1950, there were a few things kind of sticking up above ground, but there was nothing really to see, per se,” Anderson said. “The architects were the first generation of Cornellians who were there, and the project really committed to taking what they’d excavated responsibly, supplementing it through newly manufactured pieces, and presenting a total experience of the structure, instead of just producing a drawing and putting it in a publication.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, the team rebuilt a monumental bath-gymnasium complex and the largest synagogue in the ancient world, projects that were the first of their kind and served as models for reconstructions at other sites.

There followed the discovery of city mud brick walls, the acropolis, a Persian-period garbage pit, a site for gold refinement, an ancient shopping center and, recently, a sanctuary plaza that required 15 years of excavation work.

‘The pieces start to add up’

The project is institutionally housed under Harvard Art Museums, and it has grown to include Turkish and other U.S. institutions, among them University of Wisconsin, Madison and University of California, Berkeley. Cornell’s main contribution is now sending graduate students—and increasingly, some undergrads—in archaeology and anthropology to Sardis for 10 weeks each summer.

The students either work in a depot, where recovered relics—the great majority of which are ceramics, or “broken pots,” according to Anderson—are classified and entered into a database, or they supervise the excavation trenches.

Because Sardis sits on an alluvial plain of silt, the trenches are essentially shafts, some of which extend as far as 12 meters down—”quite terrifying in their own right,” Anderson said.

“Local workers, who are already trained, gradually remove the soil, and the students are there observing, documenting, taking notes, asking questions, determining when they need to stop and call in maybe the director or an associate director to take a look at what’s coming up, when they should take a photograph, when they should bring in the architects to make a state drawing of a particular moment,” Anderson said.

Sardis is one of three excavation projects worldwide that “most people who go on to a career in classical archaeology in the U.S. have been through,” Anderson said.

The Harvard-Cornell team is joined by researchers representing a variety of disciplines from around the globe, more than half of whom are Turkish experts and students. But also the local contributions are crucial.

“A topic that regularly accompanies what we are doing is how are we doing it? How do we include local expertise?” Alexandridis said.

Currently, in addition to men, a large group of women from Sardis is excavating and doing restoration work.

Leyla Uğurer, a doctoral student in history of art and archaeology, was born and raised in the Sardis region and initially studied English and literature at Istanbul University. She later returned to study classical archaeology.

“To learn archaeology, you have to work at the site as well,” she said.

In 2022, she began to work on surveying rock-cut tombs, from Lydians to Romans, all around the city, and she continued that effort through her first three summers. This year, she supervised the excavation of a late Roman site.

Because of her experience with the project, Uğurer decided to pursue her Ph.D. at Cornell. She found a perfect match in Alexandridis, who serves as her adviser, because of their shared interest in funerary art, which not only offers insights into how a culture thinks about aesthetics and the afterlife, but also its daily reality.

This was the city on “one of the most important trade roads in the ancient world,” where the first coin was minted and Alexander the Great visited, Uğurer said. “You were raised there, so you have the same culture going on in you and around you. I remember looking at archaeologists when I was a child and admiring them. To be familiar with those archaeological works going on also helps you understand the archaeological importance more.”

The UNESCO designation reinforces those feelings. And there are practical benefits as well.

“As a local, I can say it is very important,” she said. “First of all, now it is known worldwide and because of UNESCO, there can maybe be more funding for the excavation, also people, more tourists and more research. People will know the area much better, and there will be more protection.”

That protection has been long due. The city’s topography is vulnerable to the elements. Numerous tumuli have been destroyed by agricultural activities. Looting has now reached “industrial dimensions,” Alexandridis said, with treasure-seekers dynamiting the tomb mounds and bringing in bulldozers, and often weapons.

The story of Sardis is ongoing, but piece by piece, it is slowly coming together.

“This is why the long-term commitment is so important,” Anderson said. “One season’s work, you’ll learn how to do the thing, but you’re not necessarily going to find something that will be especially significant for the history of the site, until maybe 10 years later, you find something else a little bit further away, and the pieces start to add up.”