Tag: Antiochia ad Cragum

RTI at Antiochia ad Cragum (Cragnum)

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

We mentioned the finds at Antiochia ad Cragum (maybe Cragnum really not sure of the spelling any more)the other day  (Head of Aphrodite from Antiochia ad Cragnum ) … Here’s an interesting bit of technology used there via a St Olaf College press release:

A group of St. Olaf College students working on an archaeological dig in Turkey became some of the first researchers in the world to use a new technology that could change how scholars study artifacts.

And one of the first artifacts they documented using the technology was a life-sized marble head of the goddess Aphrodite that their group helped unearth. The find, which has attracted attention from national media outlets including NBC News , is important because it sheds new light on the extent of the Roman Empire’s wide cultural influence, which scholars previously argued didn’t reach as far as southern Turkey.

The new technology, called reflectance transformance imaging (RTI), takes about 70 photos of an artifact from an array of angles and artificially inserts various lighting on the object. In a sense, it takes the normal 2-D images and creates a composite 3-D image.

Associate Professor of History Tim Howe led the monthlong program to southern Turkey, where 10 students participated in a dig as part of his Archaeological Methods course and another four students used RTI to document artifacts as part of a project through the college’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) program.

RTI is the future of archaeology, says Howe, noting that the St. Olaf team is the first to use the technology on an active excavation site. Because RTI reveals writing, dates, and images on objects that aren’t visible to the human eye, looking at an object through the technology can be even better than handling it in person — a feature that the St. Olaf team learned firsthand.

“We were able to determine the date of a fallen milestone by demonstrating that there were no additional lines of text above the mile numbers and confirm that it was established during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, rather than his son Commodus as previously assumed,” explains Howe.

His next goal is to create a digital museum of artifacts using RTI. The site would have the raw 3-D images, data collected for each object, and a GPS link so people will know where and how it was found. Researchers around the world would have the ability to look at these objects without ever traveling to Turkey.

“RTI is really poised to become the new way of archaeology,” Howe adds.

Tackling new technology
Howe first learned about RTI at a conference. St. Olaf purchased the relatively low-cost technology thanks to a digital humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as support from the Dean’s Academic Innovation Fund, the CURI program, and the college’s Office of Information Technology.

Jason Menard, an instructional technologist with the IT Office who holds a doctorate in Roman archaeology and geographic information systems from the University of Minnesota, worked closely with the members of Howe’s team and provided field support that made their work possible.

Students taking part in this summer’s program in Antiochia ad Cragum, Turkey, worked to uncover an ancient marketplace and a massive bath complex, both of which included mosaics.

They documented many of their finds — which included an arrowhead from the first century B.C. and a number of coins in addition to the Aphrodite statue — using RTI.

Because they were the first group to use RTI on an active archeological dig, there were few references or manuals to refer to when a problem arose.

“If we encountered a problem, often there was no place we could turn to for a ‘correct’ answer; rather, we had to creatively come up with solutions and critically think about the process and technology we were using,” says Nicole Wagner ‘15.

Members of the team were fascinated by the level of detail from the RTI images, which allowed them to see inscriptions no one had seen for thousands of years.

“We would take a completed RTI image to one of the professors and they would discover something new about the object they had studied for years,” says Seth Ellingson ‘15. “That was the greatest reward.”

This RTI technology seems to be the next big (and useful) thing, especially in epigraphy … Bill Caraher has a post on its application in that sort of context: Linear B in 3D . For a more technical sort of look, here’s a link that came up during a discussion on Aegeanet a week or so ago (tip o’ the pileus to Peter Campbell): Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).

Head of Aphrodite from Antiochia ad Cragnum

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

From a UN-L press release:

Shoveling and sweeping to expose still-hidden portions of a 1,600-square-foot marble mosaic that dates to Roman times, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln archeological team this past summer unearthed a new treasure in southern Turkey.

Lying face down in more than a millennium of soil was a life-size marble head, the remnant of a sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite – still beautiful, though scarred by chips on its nose and face.

The sculpture’s body was missing, likely incinerated in a lime kiln many centuries ago.

By somehow escaping destruction, Aphrodite’s head provides yet another telling detail about how profoundly the region was affected by Greek and Roman culture during the first and second centuries, said project director Michael Hoff, Hixson-Lied professor of art history at UNL. Hoff returned to Nebraska in late August after spending nearly three months in Turkey.

The head, Hoff said, is the only piece of monumental sculpture recovered so far in an eight-year archeological dig at the site of Antiochia ad Cragnum (Antioch on the cliffs), an ancient Mediterranean city that once numbered perhaps 8,000 people.

Last year, Hoff’s team discovered a mosaic thought to be the largest of its type in the region. Archeologists believe it adorned an open-air plaza outside a soaring, 60-foot-high Roman bath house.

Aphrodite’s head was a highlight of a 2013 excavation that also uncovered the vestiges of what appears to be a temple, with a second marble mosaic covering its interior floor.

It is unusual to find a mosaic floor in a temple, Hoff said. His next step is to research other examples to learn more about how mosaics relate to temple architecture.

With assistance from Clark University in Worcester, Mass., and Ataturk University in Turkey, the project has excavated sites in a 200-square kilometer area where Antiochia was located. The project’s co-directors are Rhys Townsend, an art history professor at Clark University; Ece Erdogmus, a native of Turkey who is an architectural engineering professor at NU’s Peter Kiewit Institute in Omaha; and Birol Can, an associate professor of archeology at Ataturk University.

One of Erdogmus’ roles is to help reassemble the stones of another temple located not far from the site of the bathhouse.

The new discoveries add evidence that early residents of Antiochia – which was established at about the time of Emperor Nero in the middle of the first century and flourished during the height of the Roman Empire – adopted many of the trappings of Roman civilization, though they lived in relative isolation a thousand miles from Rome. In the past, scholars believed the region’s culture had been too insular to be heavily impacted by Rome.

Yet Hoff and his team have found many signs that contradict that belief.

“We have niches where statues once were. We just didn’t have any statues,” Hoff said. “Finally, we have the head of a statue. It suggests something of how mainstream these people were who were living here, how much they were a part of the overall Greek and Roman traditions.”

Before the city was founded, the region had been a haven for pirates, including the Cilician pirates who kidnapped Julius Caesar in about 75 B.C. Francis Beaufort, an officer in the British Royal Navy, identified Antiochia’s location in the early 19th century using a guide written by the ancient Roman geographer Ptolemy.

Time, and probably Christian vandals, erased much of the evidence of Antiochia. The bath’s vaulted ceilings may have collapsed in an earthquake. By the third century, Rome’s influence was disrupted by insurrections and rampaging armies. By the fourth century, the area was a key site in the development of Christianity – and Hoff suspects that radical Christians destroyed many of the marble statues and reliefs in an effort to eliminate pagan idolatry.

The archeological team has found evidence of lime kilns near the site, leading Hoff to believe many statues and marble panels were burned to make slaked lime used in concrete. It also appears that at about the same time, the sturdy floor created by the plaza mosaic was used as the base for a glass-blowing furnace.

The glass furnace dates to the late Roman period, which began in the middle of the fourth century, Hoff said. He is now convinced that the bath and temple and their mosaics date to the late second or early third century.

Only about half the plaza mosaic was excavated in 2012. The archeologists returned to the site this summer to excavate the its west half. Their efforts included clearing out a 50-foot long, marble-lined swimming pool in the center of the plaza. They found two stairways leading into the oval pool, as well as built-in benches along its inner sides.

The team turned its shovels toward a mound just south of the plaza, where toppled columns lay half-buried. Telltale signs in the layout make the archeologists believe the building had been a Roman temple, though that has yet to be confirmed.

“Everything about it is telling us it’s a temple, but we don’t have much in the way of to whom it was dedicated,” he said. “We’re still analyzing the finds. But the architecture suggests heavily that it was a temple.”

While the larger bath plaza mosaic features large patterned areas, the temple mosaic uses smaller tesserae to compose geometric designs, as well as images of fruit and floral images amidst a chain guilloche of interlocking circles. The temple mosaic measures about 600 square feet.

Though both mosaics are “spectacular,” the temple mosaic is definitely different from the much larger plaza mosaic, Hoff said.

“I don’t think they are connected,” he said.

The two mosaics likely were designed by different artists, with wealthy patrons of the region hiring itinerant contractors to construct the buildings for public use.

Conservators followed the archeological team to protect the mosaics from additional damage and to repair damaged areas with special mortar. Though the mosaics eventually will be prepared for public display, they now are covered with a conservation blanket and a thick layer of sand.

The rubble of the bath’s collapsed ceilings will be cleared during a future excavation season. Parts of the stone substructure of the bath’s walls have remained standing, their marble veneer long missing. Local lore was that treasure was buried at the site.

Hoff said the excavations have, indeed, yielded treasures – though perhaps not those anticipated by legend.

Some nice photos accompany the original article. There’s also this nice little video:

For some previous coverage of this dig:

Graecomuse also had a nice post this past June just prior to the digging, chock full of background and bibliography:

Followup: Mosaic at Antiochia ad Cragum

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Some additional coverage to add to our previous post: Nice Mosaic from Antiochia ad Cragam (which we also corrected spellingwise to Cragum)

First, a video from the UNebraska folks themselves:


Alia (derived from the UNebraska release we mentioned in our previous post):

Nice Mosaic from Antiochia ad Cragum

~ David Meadows ~ rogueclassicist ~ Leave a comment

Tip o’ the pileus to Lyndsay Powell for alerting us to this one from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln:

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln archeological team, led by Hixson-Lied Professor of Art History Michael Hoff, has uncovered a massive Roman mosaic in southern Turkey – a meticulously crafted, 1,600-square-foot work of decorative handiwork built during the region’s imperial zenith.

It’s believed to be the biggest mosaic of its type and demonstrates the reach and cultural influence of the Roman Empire in the area in the third and fourth centuries A.D., said Hoff, the director of the excavation.

“This is very possibly the largest Roman mosaic found in the region,” Hoff said. “And its large size also signals, in no small part, that the outward signs of the Roman Empire were, in fact, very strong in this far-flung area of the Empire.”

The discovery will aid researchers studying the region. Since 2005, Hoff’s team has been excavating the remains of the ancient city of Antiochia ad Cragum on the southern Turkish coast. Antiochus of Commagene, a client-king of Rome, founded the ancient city in the middle of the first century.

“The mosaic is a quintessential Roman artistic element. This hammers home how Roman this city truly is,” Hoff said. “We always thought this was a peripheral Roman city, but it’s becoming more and more clear that it’s weighted more on the Roman side than the native side. The mosaic really emphasizes the pure Roman nature of this city and should answer a lot of questions regarding the interaction between the indigenous locals and the Roman Empire.”

Antiochia ad Cragum was a modest city by Roman standards and outfitted with many of the typical trappings one would expect from a Roman provincial city – temples, baths, markets and colonnaded streets, said Hoff. The city thrived during the Empire from an economy that focused on agricultural products, especially wine and lumber.

Excavation work has focused on a third-century temple dedicated to the Roman imperial cult, and also a colonnaded street lined with commercial shops. In July, the team began to explore the mosaic, which was part of a Roman Bath. The decoration consists of large squares, each filled with different colored geometric designs and ornamentation.

“This would have been a very formal associated pavement attached to the bath,” Hoff said. “This is a gorgeous mosaic, and the size of it is unprecedented” – so large, in fact, that work crews have uncovered only an estimated 40 percent of its total area.

Hoff said it appears the mosaic served as a forecourt for the adjacent large bath, and that at least on one side, evidence shows there was a roof covering the geometric squares that would have been supported by piers. Those piers’ remains are preserved, he said.

Meanwhile, the middle of the mosaic was outfitted with a marble-lined, 25-foot-long pool, which would have been uncovered and open to the sun. The other half of the mosaic, adjacent to the bath, has yet to be revealed but is expected to contain the same type of decoration, Hoff said. Crews expect to unearth the entire work next summer.

“It should be pretty extraordinary,” Hoff said.

Team members first noticed the mosaic in 2001, when Nicholas Rauh of Purdue University, the director of a large archaeological survey project that included Hoff, noticed plowing by a local farmer had brought up pieces of a mosaic in a field next to a still-standing bath structure. The find was brought to the attention of the archeological museum in Alanya, who two years later made a minor investigation that revealed a small portion of the mosaic.

Last year, the museum invited Hoff to clear the entire mosaic and to preserve it for tourists to view and scholars to study.

Hoff’s 60-person team also included Birol Can, assistant professor of archaeology at Atatürk University in Ezrurum, Turkey, a sister university to the University of Nebraska; students from UNL; other students from Turkey and the United States; and workers from a nearby village. About 35 students participated in the project as part of a summer field school Hoff runs.

Phalin Strong, a sophomore art major from Lincoln, said the work was difficult but satisfying.

“It is strange to realize that you are the first person to see this for centuries – a feeling that also made me think about impermanence and what importance my actions have on humanity and history,” Strong said.

Ben Kreimer, a senior journalism major, agreed: “(Working on) the mosaic was great because the more soil you removed, the more mosaic there was,” he said. “Visually, it was also stunning, especially once it got cleaned off. It wasn’t very deep under the surface of the soil, either, so … we had to be careful not to swing the handpick too hard so as not to damage the priceless mosaic that lay just inches beneath us.”

Hoff said the significance of this summer’s discovery has him eager to return to the site and see what the rest of the excavation uncovers.

“As an archaeologist, I am always excited to make new discoveries. The fact that this discovery is so large and also not completely uncovered makes it doubly exciting,” he said. “I am already looking forward to next year, though I just returned from Turkey.”

… a photo accompanies the original article; it seems to have a nice mix of geometric styles if you want to give your mosaics class a little quiz.