Temple of the Goddess of Love
The glamorous archaeology headline item here isn’t “Amazing Surface Survey.” Instead, it’s the discovery of a previously unknown 5th century BCE temple of Aphrodite in western Turkey. And that is pretty impressive. Archaeologists first found a statue fragment of a woman and then a terracotta female head. Eventually, inscriptions on stonework showed they’d stumbled upon a rural temple dedicated to Aphrodite. Greek temples have clear borders marking the sacred realm, the temenos. That border demarcation is labeled here with the statement that translates to, “This is the sacred area.” The ruins are an hour and a half walk from the nearest small road. That explains why no one had come upon this gem before the surface survey.
The Value of Surface Survey
So that’s the info the press puts in the lead. However, the major archaeological effort underlying this discovery was an extensive surface survey of settlement patterns from the Neolithic period onward in the region of Izmir. The survey started back in 2006. The significance of the survey is clear from the range of findings. “Around 460 settlements and landscape elements, including sacred areas, tumuli, paths, terraces, villages and farms used in ancient times, have been found in the region. Information about the economic and social relations of the people living in the region, whose history dates back to 6,000 B.C.”
Surface surveys are one of the essential tools of contemporary archaeology. They involve a lot of people (frequently students) moving on foot over a lot of land. The addition of this “big view” technique lifts archaeology out of seeing each excavated city as isolated. Each dig as an unrelated point of information with a silent surrounding landscape.
Lessons Learned
One of the conclusions researchers drew from this particular survey is that Neolithic people spaced their settlements regular distances apart. That strikes me as fascinatingly organized and cooperative. Letting everyone succeed by not crowding each other’s territory, perhaps? Now that the survey has marked out the settlement patterns, closer studies can follow up. The will build on this “bird’s eye” picture.
Overall, surface surveys tell researchers how a major city center in the ancient world interacted with the countryside around it. How various scattered centers interacted with each other. Rises and falls of fortified centers versus open, unwalled living areas. Intensification into one power center like a palace with huge storage capacity versus widespread growth across an uncentralized, rural, burgeoning landscape. Equalitarian models versus authoritarian. Agricultural patterns, villages versus urban centers, roads, dams, irrigation technologies, and trade routes are all accessed as useful information through surveys.
The close-up excavation of the 5th century temple will also carry on. That’s the kind of dig most people think of as “archaeology.” (For more on Aphrodite on the island of Cyprus) It began in 2016 when some archaeologist, spaced X distance from another person, walked the landscape and spotted a piece of statue. That made for a moment of high excitement in many long days of concentrated observation, but the lessons gathered over the long haul are at least as important, probably more so.
Click here to read the Hurriyet Daily News “Ruins of Aphrodite Temple found in Urla”