Teens and Tumuli: Cultural Heritage Education at Gordion, Turkey
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
By Ayșe Gürsan-Salzmann, Naomi F. Miller, and Janelle Sadarananda This post is part of a series reporting on the Gordion Cultural Heritage Education Project, led by Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Assistant Director of the Gordion Project. Halil Demirdelen, Deputy Director of the Ankara museum, provided invaluable educational support. Naomi F. Miller, consulting scholar at the Penn Museum, and […]
Start Somewhere – Janelle Sadarananda
By: Anne Tiballi
Every year, the Penn Museum provides support to Penn undergraduates and graduate students as they deepen their understanding of the human experience outside the Museum’s walls. Follow these blog posts from our intrepid young scholars as they report on the sights and sites that they encounter throughout their travels in the field. 2 July 2015 […]
Portraying Nippur: Artist Osman Hamdi Bey’s Early Relationship with the Penn Museum
By: Hannah Effinger
The Penn Museum is perhaps best known for its impressively large and varied collection of artifacts spanning practically the entirety of human existence, but recently visitors were given a special chance to step into the Museum Archives to learn about some unexpected items housed in the Museum—two paintings and the unique ties they have to […]
Yassıhöyük Village: Where and when did the villagers come from?
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
About 100 years ago the earliest known inhabitants of the Yassıhöyük village arrived there from different regions of Anatolia, and settled near the banks of the Sakarya river that flowed through the ancient settlement of Gordion. The early subsistence base was animal husbandry supplemented by farming cereals with horse and iron-tipped wooden plough, a threshing […]
A Short Tour of Yassıhöyük (Gordion) Village
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
Generally, when visitors arrive at Gordion, they see the monumental Midas Mound, the tomb of the Phrygian king, and the Museum where a collection of excavated artifacts are displayed. Next to the Museum is the tea-house, “çayevi”, where tea, cold drinks and freshly baked thin-layered crusty bread, (gözleme), and pita type bread (bazlama) are served […]
Meet Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann, Assistant Director of the Gordion Project
By: Ayşe Gürsan-Salzmann
In 1995 I joined the Gordion Archaeological Project to study the socio-economic structure of the traditional villages in the region. The ultimate goal was to inform the ancient economic practices of the Phrygian kingdom, using the method of ethnographic analogy from the nearby contemporary villages, to help interpret the archaeological evidence. The ancient economy was […]
Self-guided walking tours for visitors to Gordion, Turkey
By: Naomi Miller
In earlier posts (August 3, 2012 and August 8, 2014), I mentioned the Gordion “ecopark” project’s goal of preserving regional biodiversity, the historical landscape, and the archaeological site itself. One part of the project concerns visitor education. I first visited Gordion as a tourist in 1983 and began archaeobotanical fieldwork there in 1988. I have […]
Archives Photo of the Week: Happy Turkey Day!
By: Eric Schnittke
Happy Turkey Day! … What, you expected an actual turkey? This week’s photo is a view of Istanbul (then Constantinople) and the Galata Bridge. The Galata Bridge spans the Golden Horn, an inlet of the Bosphorus Strait, the waterway that separates Europe and Asia. The Galata Bridge is now in it’s fifth build, with this photograph showing the […]
Mediterranean Quiver [Object of the Day #87]
By: Alyssa Kaminski
Today’s object is only a fragment of a quiver that has been broken at the top. It is coated in a very dark green patina with a lighter, rough interior. The upper right hand corner of the inside has an area of red corrosion. This hints that a metal object may have come in […]
Angora Goats in Yassıhöyük, Turkey, Near Gordion
By: Naomi Miller
Ayşe knows everyone in the Yassıhöyük, and one of her friends is Metin the shepherd. Last year, he sold all his sheep and replaced them with a herd of (mostly) angora goats—the kind of goat that produces mohair—which I guess makes him a goat herder. We went out to the corral to watch him prepare […]