Excavations vs. Publications

Publish or perish...

One day in March 2008, a hot discussion was going on at TAY Cockpit. Central idea of the discussion at the beginning was the ‘necessity of archaeological excavations’ which then turned into ‘excavation reports’. Actually, those were the basic theoretical questions of archaeology, which hundreds of scholars from every country thought about.

Discussion topic soon reached to ‘final reports’ issue*. Many archaeologists like Bradley, Hodder and Chadwick who wrote about the theory and philosophy of archaeology, agreed that an excavation can only be justified to answer a scientifically mature question and in a final report, that answer must be clearly stated before explaining the stratifications, findings, etc.**

Today, if there is no scientific need or a rescue purpose, the general attitude is leaning towards not to excavate. And, if there is a real need for an excavation, that ‘need’ and purpose has to be definitely included in the ‘final report’. We also have to remember that, first of all and before the ‘report’, there must be a “final” for the archaeological excavation, which is very rare in our country.

At that point, our discussion at TAY turned to “final reports” and we wondered how many archaeological excavations we had in Turkey and how many of them had their “final reports”. This was not a very easy question to answer. Apart from “final reports”, there was not an archaeological excavations list for Turkey.

So, at first hand, we began preparing that list, which took unnecessarily long time. Main reason for this delay also proved our main idea; there was not many ‘final reports’. Many important excavations passed over lightly by simple articles, if any. Archaeologists who used to write articles at Türk Arkeoloji Dergisi or Belleten, began to have a presentation at ‘International Symposium of Excavations and Archaeometry’ since 1980 and believed that is sufficient. As a result, very few of excavations had ‘final reports!’

This list, which was created after a year of long and grinding work, depicts a near-complete picture of Turkish archaeology, but undoubtfully there are some faults and imperfections which will be refined in the future by your contributions. But the important thing was to begin preparing such a list and prevent the perish of the unpublished.

* Final report is a digital or hardcopy ‘book’, which is related with the excavation of an ancient culture’s site / building(s) or monuments belonging to a certain time period, which also contains information related to the geomorphology, geography, fauna and flora of that specific region, in addition to the architecture, small finds, statistical distribution, stratification, chronology and dating, analytic research for that specific excavation, including the comments and questions about that ancient culture, including visual catalogues and lists.

** “The Excavation Report as a Literary Genre”, R. Bradley, World Archaeology, December 2006; “Archaeology at the Edge of Chaos”, A. Chadwick, Assemblage, London, 1998; “Writing archaeology: site reports in context”, I. Hodder, Antiquity, 1989.