Archaeology: Digging for History

Archaeologists have learned to be satisfied if their patient scraping unearths the wherewithal for even a footnote in the slowly growing record of man’s early history. But recent digs have turned up enough material to flesh out two rich chapters in that saga. At Sardis, in western Turkey, a Harvard-Cornell N.Y.U. group has uncovered what is believed to be one of King Croesus’ fabled gold refineries. In the barren desert of southeastern Iran, archaeologists from Harvard’s Peabody Museum have found evidence of an extinct Middle Eastern city that was conquered by Alexander the Great during the latter part of its 5,500-year existence.

Bowls of Croesus. The search for Croesus’ refinery began when Andrew Ramage, one of the Harvardmen on the expedition, noticed some oddly similar circular depressions in a clay floor near the site of a shrine built to Cybele, the goddess who protected ores and metals. Not far off was the Pactolus Torrent, which once was noted for its gold-rich sands. Moreover, slag similar to that produced in metal smelting rimmed the edges of the depressions. Ramage and his colleagues soon realized that they had stumbled on an ore refinery.

Careful digging revealed that the circular depressions were cupels, or metal-refining bowls. Unearthed with them were four furnaces, remnants of bellows, tiny bits of gold and gold alloys, and pottery fragments from the time (570-547 B.C.) when Croesus ruled the Lydian Empire in what is now western Turkey.

Uncommon Elephants. Some 1,700 miles and 50 centuries removed from the Sardis dig, the Peabody group discovered a far different trove of relics and artifacts. At the base of the mound they are excavating lie the remains of a neolithic community that thrived as early as 5500 B.C. The find upsets earlier theories, which held that neolithic man had never ventured into such inhospitable surroundings. And unlike other neolithic settlements, the Peabody dig is surrounded by remnants of a mammoth wall, 7 ft. high and 20 ft. thick. Behind it the archaeologists have uncovered a series of tiny chambers that they believe may lead to an unexcavated temple.

In one of the rooms the researchers discovered a slightly damaged 10-in. statue of a fertility goddess lying face down near some primitive sculptor’s tools. Carved from soft stone and rich in detail, the statuette is long and slender, in contrast to the crude neolithic sculpture thought to be typical of this early period. “In five years,” says Peabody Anthropologist C. C. Lemberg-Karlovsky, “this piece will be lectured in all coffee-table art books as a prize example of primitive sculpture.”

At higher levels of the mound, the Peabody team has discovered evidence that the community survived far beyond the neolithic era. Higher still are the remains of a fortified Persian city built in approximately 400 B.C. Lemberg-Karlovsky suspects that it is the ancient city of Carmania, which Alexander the Great conquered without shedding a drop of blood in 325 B.C. Although his theory is as yet unproven, the Harvard anthropologist points out that the teeth of elephants, animals uncommon to the area but regularly used for military transportation by Alexander, have been unearthed in the top of the mound. And in a nearby village, young boys are often called “Iskanda,” a name almost never heard elsewhere in Iran. Iskanda, explains Lemberg-Karlovsky, means Alexander.