Introduction
Much archaeology across the world is historically, and still today, a colonialist endeavour in which local communities have varying amounts of control. It also often serves state agendas in which both supremacy and diplomacy might be pursued through national archaeology programmes and collaboration with non-local teams of researchers (see Nicholas & Hollowell, Reference Nicholas, Hollowell, Hamilakis and Duke2016 for discussion). Archaeological fieldwork is an activity in which hierarchies are generally the norm, whether it be between students and project directors or undergraduates and postgraduates (Leighton, Reference Leighton2020). The voice of manual workers or labourers and the levels of skill and knowledge to which they have access or with which they have been credited have been mediated and often controlled by those with responsibility for project management (Quirke, Reference Quirke2010; Çelik, Reference Çelik2016). Just as, following Leighton (Reference Leighton2020: 445), ‘performing informality’ in the correct way has been identified as an aspect of contemporary fieldwork relations in the United States, performing knowledge or non-knowledge can be seen as vital in other fieldwork scenarios (Mickel, Reference Mickel2021).
The relationship between academic archaeologists and workers/labourers is specific to archaeological practice in certain areas of the world. One such region is western Asia, where both local and non-local archaeologists have traditionally worked with local teams undertaking the heavy labour, often with little or no formal training in the subject. In this article I shall use the term ‘worker’ as a shortcut referring to local, mostly manual, workers, even though all people working on an excavation, in whatever capacity, are workers. This type of hierarchy involving local people with limited archaeological training, some of whom are responsible for the activities of others, and professional archaeologists is far from unique to the Near Eastern tradition but has generally received little critical attention (Leighton, Reference Leighton2016: 743). Mickel's (Reference Mickel2021) research on the projects at Çatalhöyük and the Temple of the Winged Lions in Petra, both in south-western Asia, highlights the complex relationships that exist between those who organize excavations and those who work for them, including the almost total silence of the latter in the production of history (Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: 11). Mickel (Reference Mickel2021: 12) emphasizes the apparent lack of progress regarding the integration of the intellectual contribution of workers over the last decades, as well as the possibility of ‘the performance of non-knowledge’ (Mickel, Reference Mickel2021: 91), the active downplaying of their archaeological knowledge, by workers keen to maintain positions in the long term.
In this article, a group of non-Turkish archaeologists working in Türkiye with teams of local workers in the mid-twentieth century, centred around the work of James Mellaart, is used to probe into the public face of director–worker relationships. Looking through publication and archive materials, the directors’ acknowledgement of the fundamental importance of the workers and the ongoing relationship with named individuals gives the impression of active communication, with workers valued for their accumulated knowledge, reliability, and responsibility. The degree to which this knowledge and role within projects was publicly expressed is assessed here from a range of reports, which are evaluated for acknowledgement of the roles of various team members and scrutinized for signs of change through time.
The degree to which exploitation, lack of awareness, adherence to social norms, and colonial attitudes played out in archaeological fieldwork, plus the fact that consciousness of such issues is not expected to have been prominent in the mid-twentieth century, are used to contextualize and add temporal depth to Mickel's (Reference Mickel2021) research on more recent employment of workers in archaeological projects. Written sources are examined to evaluate expectations of knowledge or ignorance among workers, and what is meant by a ‘team’ and its relationship with knowledge production and control within archaeological fieldwork. In conclusion, I consider which directors’ behaviours might be thought characteristic of their time, and whether there has subsequently been a conscious lack of engagement with issues of participation in knowledge acquisition by those in control of archaeological projects. The article's aim is to contextualize Mellaart's stance, evaluate whether it was ‘of its time’ or outside the norms of relationships in fieldwork and investment in archaeological training in Türkiye in the 1960s. A wider aim is to test the validity of generalizations about the development of archaeological practice through time and ask whether the more recent lack of acknowledgement of workers owes itself to ignorance of the issues in question.
Colonial Context and Production of Scientific Knowledge
From 1923 onwards, the young Turkish republic encouraged foreign archaeological missions, both old and new, and sought to develop local archaeological education and excavation more actively by sending young scholars for training abroad and inviting foreign professors to Turkish universities (Özdoğan, Reference Özdoğan and Meskell1998: 118; Tanyeri-Erdemir, Reference Tanyeri-Erdemir2006). Excavation, aimed at writing the (heavily politically motivated) history of the region was strongly encouraged (Tanyeri-Erdemir, Reference Tanyeri-Erdemir2006: 384). This trend had, however, started much earlier, with the intensely multicultural Ottoman Empire encompassing at its height most regions associated with early narratives of civilization. During the final decades of the Empire, the Ottoman intellectual and archaeologist Osman Hamdi is credited with raising public and political awareness of heritage and instigating a new imperial heritage policy (Eldem, Reference Eldem, Bahrani, Çelik and Eldem2011). The new republic was in the unusual position of having been both colonized and colonizer (see Hamilakis, Reference Hamilakis, Damaskos and Plantzos2008: 3–4 for a discussion of the complexities of such a situation) while simultaneously building a new national identity dependent on Western ideals. It has indeed been argued that ‘…archaeology began in Turkey as an imitation of that in the West’ (Özdoğan, Reference Özdoğan and Meskell1998: 113). The Istanbul Archaeology Museum (Ottoman Imperial Museum) and the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, a republican project without direct colonial input and designed to showcase republican archaeology, exemplify the contrast between old and new (Gür, Reference Gür and Özyürek2007: 41; Eldem, Reference Eldem, Bahrani, Çelik and Eldem2011).
Foreign archaeology schools had been operating in Istanbul under the Empire and later under the Turkish Republic with its new capital in Ankara (Özdoğan, Reference Özdoğan and Meskell1998: 117–18) and thus they played a significant role in archaeological practice in the country. Meanwhile, Türkiye's location between East and West, i.e. adjacent to but not in the ‘cradle of civilization’, led foreign scholars to downplay the importance of the country's territory in major historical or archaeological narratives (e.g. Lloyd, Reference Lloyd1956: 53–54, 58–61). It was in this environment that some younger foreign scholars undertook to excavate prehistoric sites. At a time when archaeology was beginning to gain significant traction in Türkiye (Özdoğan, Reference Özdoğan and Meskell1998: 119), they chose to work explicitly against the then current colonial civilization discourse and challenge the accepted paradigm. The surprising sophistication of the Neolithic cultures led to an awareness of unexpected levels of pre-‘civilization’ complexity, mirrored elsewhere in the world (Trigger, Reference Trigger1984: 361). The work of James Mellaart at Hacılar and Çatalhöyük and that of David French at Canhasan offers insight into a remarkably non-colonial attitude to the voices of local workers as well as a direct challenge to the colonially influenced agenda of the then director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA), Seton Lloyd. Mellaart and French operated in something of a no-man's land between Europe and the area known as the ‘Near East’ and, however fairly they may have behaved, they still belonged to a system that appropriated the past of the region to advance the careers of Western or Westernized scholars (Hodder, Reference Hodder and Meskell1998: 126, 135).
Acknowledging that ‘those closest to the source of extracted data have little control over the means of production or access to potential benefits, and often they are the ones most lacking in political and economic capital’ (Nicholas & Hollowell, Reference Nicholas, Hollowell, Hamilakis and Duke2016: 65), I examine how archaeological team relationships have been reported in publication from the 1950s onwards, as revealed in the annual reports of British archaeologists working in Türkiye and those of their Turkish and non-Turkish contemporaries. I then compare these with more recent practice.
Team Relationship Structures in Publication
It is unusual, even today, for most of those carrying out the work of excavation and post-excavation to be mentioned in publications. When lists of names appear, they are usually in published annual reports or grey literature prepared as part of legal reporting requirements. In south-western Asia, and in the specific case of Türkiye, the employment of workers to carry out heavy and relatively unskilled tasks for a standard minimum daily wage has long been integral to archaeological practice. The relation of those workers, often experienced after years of repeat employment, with the research teams of which they are a crucial part is often obfuscated by the lack of records of their presence or only perfunctory acknowledgement in archives, preliminary reports, or publications, even today.
The operation of the excavations at Çatalhöyük and the production of archaeological knowledge have been widely discussed for the second period of excavation, led by Ian Hodder between 1993 and 2017. Multivocality was a key feature of Hodder's approach (Hodder, Reference Hodder, Habu, Fawcett and Matsunaga2008), which sought to give a voice to all who wanted to speak about the project. This included one of the site guards, Sadrettin Dural, who used his knowledge of the site to become a novelist and biographer (Dural, Reference Dural2016). This engagement with different perspectives started with the recognition of the site by James Mellaart, David French, and Alan Hall during a survey in the 1950s. When Mellaart started excavating at Çatalhöyük in 1961, his experience included a stint at Jericho with Kathleen Kenyon, as well as his own excavations. He was used to employing local workers, as were his colleagues at the BIAA.
Occasional insights in publications suggest that mid-twentieth century projects, such as Mellaart's, were more accepting of, or even reliant on, a range of voices, and that there was greater awareness of the humanity and skills of the workers than might be assumed. Attitudes towards workers can be gleaned from the publication of projects run by both Turkish and non-Turkish teams in central Türkiye. These are compared to present-day attitudes, as recorded in the reports for 2011 to 2020 of the Republic of Türkiye's Ministry of Culture and Tourism annual conference for archaeologists, Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı (Excavation Results Meeting), to test whether this much-vaunted multivocality (Gillot, Reference Gillot2010: 15) has been achieved in recent decades, or whether it already existed in some contexts.
James Mellaart's Excavations in Türkiye
Although working under the aegis of the BIAA, Mellaart's position was unusual in Turkish archaeology, and particularly among non-Turkish archaeologists working in Türkiye. Having married Arlette Meryem Cenani, from an elite Istanbul family, spending time in a Bosphorus summer palace in Istanbul, and becoming familiar with the Turkish language, Mellaart established a level of communication with local workers not typical of non-Turkish archaeologists at the time. This traversal of cultural boundaries, and probably deliberate cultivation of multiple identities (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart and Baysal2019), allowed him, with the assistance of his wife, to interact without the intervention of translators or negotiators. When Mellaart undertook fieldwork, because of local social norms, the worker teams he employed were all men. Today, this gendered division of labour no longer applies to the same extent in this and surrounding regions (e.g. Hodder, Reference Hodder and Meskell1998: 130; Apaydın, Reference Apaydin2016: 831).
Lloyd and Mellaart at Beycesultan (1954–1959)
Mellaart began his excavation career alongside the then director of the BIAA, Seton Lloyd. The first official excavation of the Institute was at Beycesultan in Denizli province (location on Figure 1). From the beginning of the project, a distinction was made in reports between the foreman, the skilled, and the unskilled workmen:
‘The expedition employed five skilled workmen, trained at our own previous excavations or elsewhere, and an excellent foreman, Satılmış Saygisiz [sic], for the loan of whose services we have to thank Dr. Tahsin Ozgüç. In addition, an average of sixty unskilled labourers was enlisted from neighbouring villages.’ (Lloyd & Mellaart, Reference Lloyd and Mellaart1955: 39)
The subsequent report does not mention workers, the third and fourth reports mention no team members whatsoever; in the sixth season, the academic team and government representative are mentioned (Lloyd et al., Reference Lloyd, Mellaart and Stronach1959: 35). The end of the Beycesultan project overlapped with Hacılar, where Mellaart had begun to excavate. In the Beycesultan monographs, workers are not mentioned other than a reference to their seasonal availability; by contrast, every foreign member of the team and their duties are listed individually (Lloyd, Reference Lloyd, Lloyd and Mellaart1962).
Figure 1. Map showing location of case studies.
Mellaart at Hacılar (1957–1960)
The foreman (who remained in place throughout Mellaart's projects) and some workers at Mellaart's first independent excavation at Hacılar were recruited from among the Beycesultan team, with the addition of new local workers: ‘A foreman, Veli Karaaslan, and three trained workmen from Beycesultan were employed, as well as eighteen unskilled labourers from Hacılar’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1958: 128); ‘Three trained workmen from Beycesultan and Alaca and forty local workmen were employed under Veli Karaaslan, our foreman’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1960: 83). Although there is no mention of arrangements in the second season, by the final season Mellaart refers to the Beycesultan workers as ustas (masters). The most effusive mention came after the final season and made clear the motivation for the later continuation of this organization at Çatalhöyük:
‘An average of forty men were employed on the dig, some from Beycesultan and others from the villages of Hacılar and Karaçal (who turned out to be more satisfactory than the locals). Veli Karaaslan was again our foreman and the success of the dig is in no small measure due to him and to the skill of our Ustas, Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman, Mehmet Kurt and Mustafa Arı, all Beycesultan men.’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1962b: 29, see also Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1961: 39)
In the final publication, the structure of the team is not mentioned. Given the date of publication, this may relate to later experiences at Çatalhöyük, which resulted in previous respect for workers being lost.
Mellaart at Çatalhöyük (1961–1963, 1965)
Çatalhöyük was Mellaart's third excavation project in Türkiye, and his second as director after Hacılar; he reminds us on Friday 23 June 1961 that it is ‘Ten years since I got to Turkey!’ (Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük excavation notebook, Reference Mellaart1961). He had experience in managing a team and the advantage of having trained those with whom he worked. He now extolled the virtue of a well-trained team, including those doing the heavy labour, and ensured that a proportion were experienced in archaeology,
‘A maximum of thirty-five trained workmen from Beycesultan were employed under our foreman Veli Karaaslan, as local labour was not available. Once again our trusted ustas included Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman and Mustafa An. The advantage of employing only well trained workmen on a site like Çatal Hüyük where wall-paintings may be expected within 2 inches from the surface is obvious.’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1962a: 42)
The workers employed at Çatalhöyük are mentioned in the annual reports, published in the journal Anatolian Studies, with a clear hierarchical division between ‘workmen’ and ‘foremen’, although all were considered trained because of their previous experience at Beycesultan. In the first annual report, this acknowledgement takes final place after the thanks to sponsors, officials, and academic team members (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1962a: 42), in the second and third seasons the in-trench team appears first, before other information about the season:
‘…sixty working days, with a labour force which never exceeded thirty-five men, mostly trained under our foreman, Veli Karaaslan, at Beycesultan and Hacilar [sic]. Once again our trusted ustas included Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman and Bekir Kalayci [sic].’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1963b: 43; see also Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1964: 39)
By employing this team, Mellaart was asking his workers to travel between the villages of Çivril (Beycesultan) in Denizli province and Küçükköy (Çatalhöyük) in Konya province, approximately 400 km by road, a considerable journey at the time (Figure 1). This implies a level of trust between the parties, as well as a commitment by those undertaking the journey. The workers’ motivation to travel is not made clear; it may have been financial or related to the guarantee of employment with a known employer and probably also because relationships had previously been established. It seems that the workers from Hacılar never formed part of the skilled element of the new Çatalhöyük team, unlike the highly-skilled workers from Beycesultan.
This system held for the first three seasons but the fourth season took place under different circumstances. Mellaart had been removed from the directorship of the project because of accusations of looting and the sale of artefacts by his workmen as well as the ongoing Dorak controversy (a treasure supposedly from Dorak in north-western Turkey, most probably a fabrication, in which Mellaart was implicated) (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart and Baysal2019: 66–68). Such scenarios had long been a concern for excavation directors (Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: 154), highlighting the fragile nature of trust within archaeological projects:
‘…the foreman and some of the trained workmen engaged in intrigues directed against us and our lady representative. …faced by the threat of imminent exposure, the ringleaders persuaded the remaining Beycesultan men to desert and leave the dig. Fortunately this happened towards the very end of the excavation and we were able to carry on with a skeleton force of six local men from the villages of Kuçükköy and Karkin [sic]. The episode is only mentioned here as a warning to other excavators.’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1966: 165)
Mellaart's reports indicate several levels of hierarchy, as detailed in Table 1. The foreman was the most trusted, and in charge of organizing the team of workers. Below him was a small group of masters (ustalar) who had archaeological knowledge sufficient to excavate independently. Under them were workers with experience from previous excavations and a smaller number of inexperienced local workers (Figure 2). Mellaart's local workmen from the village of Küçükköy recollected having little idea of the point of their work at the time (Mickel, Reference Mickel2021: 86), which concurs with Mellaart's account that they were not part of the trained and responsible team in his hierarchy. We can assume that, as latecomers, they were least trusted and hierarchically less well placed than others. The final publication in book form of the first three seasons at the site acknowledges the workforce in its entirety: ‘…veterans of Beycesultan and Hacılar, or newcomers from Küçükköy, our foreman Veli Aslan and our ustas Rıfat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman and Bekir Kalayci [sic], for their skill, experience and devotion’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1967: 13).
Table 1. Roles and responsibilities at Çatalhöyük, as recorded by Mellaart (Reference Mellaart1962a, Reference Mellaart1963a, Reference Mellaart1963b, Reference Mellaart1964, Reference Mellaart1966, Reference Mellaart1967).
Figure 2. Schematic hierarchy of workers as recorded by Mellaart at Çatalhöyük (A) and Hacılar (B).
Mellaart, generally effusive in his descriptions, holds back on detail about his expert archaeological team, citing only name and role or area of expertise in Anatolian Studies (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1962a: 42). In the second report, the expert team is acknowledged two paragraphs after the workers (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1963b: 43). Mellaart sometimes similarly noted the team relationships in the Turkish Archaeology Journal Türk Arkeoloji Dergisi (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1963a: 49); although, perhaps because of the limited length, reports do not always mention the team.
The Mellaart Archive
The activities of each of the workmen are not detailed in publication, but Mellaart's personal archive from Çatalhöyük (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1961–1963) offers insights into how some activities were organized and what responsibility some team members had (Baysal, Reference Baysal and Baysal2019). In conjunction with Mellaart's interim publications, a picture can be built of the levels of trust, independence in terms of decision making and responsibility, as well as the differences in treatment with the archaeologists on the team. Overall, Mellaart's diaries contain little written description, but in sketches with comments he was generally diligent about naming those carrying out different tasks or visiting the site, particularly in the first two excavation seasons.
The first mention of the workers appears on the first page of Mellaart's notebook recording daily activity on site. He started working with the ustas on Wednesday 17 May 1961 and refers to the arrival of the rest of the workforce several days later. The foreman is referred to by his first name, Veli (Karaaslan). On day two, two houses were being excavated, each with a named worker in charge (Figure 3). Although the houses were numbered, the worker responsible for that house is used in the naming scheme, for example ‘House B1 (Rıfat's house)’ or sometimes just ‘Rifat's house’, referring to Rıfat Çelimli, who features in the reports among the ‘trusted ustas’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1962a: 42; Reference Mellaart1963a: 43). Of the two ustas named Mustafa in the first season's report, one appears as Koca M. (big Mustafa) in the diary, ‘Started trench A on west part of mound. 10 workmen under Koca Mustafa Duman’ (Wednesday 14 June 1961). Mustafa Duman returned in the following seasons and was probably the more trusted of the two Mustafas present in the first season. No other team member is mentioned during this time.
Figure 3. Mentions in Mellaart's diary of those responsible for excavating the first two houses: ‘House 1, Rıfat’ and ‘House 2, Koca M.’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1961–1963). Reproduced by permission of. Alan Mellaart.
Rıfat Çelimli continued to be trusted with the excavation of various houses, all of which are called ‘Rıfat's house’; as he is also the first to appear in all the usta lists in the annual reports, he is likely to have been the most experienced or favoured of the group. His responsibilities included, for example, the removal of a ‘basket burial’ (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1961-1963: Wednesday 4 July 1962). On Friday 17 August 1962, a truck containing artefacts was sent to the museum in Ankara and seems to have been accompanied by the foreman Veli (Karaaslan), indicating that this formed part of his responsibilities.
Mellaart's imported archaeological teams, composed mostly of foreign specialists and students, were small and inexperienced. Unlike many excavations, where a group of trained archaeologists would act as supervisors, Mellaart was alone in terms of supervision. Given the general similarity in hierarchical structure with other British-run projects abroad, including Kenyon's at Jericho, this probably reflects the tight budget on which Mellaart's projects operated, allowing little for travel costs. Although the documentation of the archaeologists’ activities is sparse, Birsen Güloğlu, brought to the project as one of three assistants in 1962, is mentioned as having drawn and cleaned a wall painting (Tuesday 19 June). These activities are never associated with workers.
Photography was kept to a minimum owing to the cost of film and difficulty of having it processed; hence there are few photographs of people at the excavation, as these were considered unnecessary. The few action shots depict either detailed work uncovering wall paintings and reliefs or Mellaart in the trenches. Occasional panoramic images show excavation areas and large numbers of workers, with Mellaart inconspicuously in their midst (Figures 4 and 5). In close-up images, Mellaart stands among the workmen and is seen in discussion in unposed situations. His clothing hardly distinguishes him from the workers, as all wear trousers and button-down shirts. There is no indication in the stance or location of Mellaart in relation to the workers of a colonial hierarchical separation (for example of such stance, see Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: fig. 5.16) or of the ‘benign imperialism’ associated with some archaeological photography (Riggs, Reference Riggs2020: 145, 157). Pictures of Mellaart were generally not selected for publication.
Figure 4. Mellaart (in short sleeves) and his workmen excavating houses at Çatalhöyük (date unknown). Reproduced by permission of Alan Mellaart.
Figure 5. Workers displaying their discovery at Çatalhöyük (top) and general view of part of the excavations (bottom) (date unknown). Reproduced by permission of Alan Mellaart.
French at Canhasan (1961–1967)
The publication pattern described above suggests that the mentions of workers are owed to Mellaart's (or Mellaart and Seton Lloyd's) influence on those around him. David French followed this example at Canhasan. Although French did not provide the same amount of detail concerning workers in his interim reports, he followed a pattern similar to Mellaart's at Çatalhöyük, including engaging the team of workers employed by Mellaart. He mentions these workers first: ‘We had the services of the foreman, Veli Karaaslan, and two trained pickmen from Beycesultan and we recruited eleven unskilled men from the village’ (French, Reference French1962: 28); ‘As last year, we employed three trained men from Beycesultan and ten unskilled men from the village’ (French, Reference French1963: 29; Reference French1964b: 21); ‘This year we employed, as usual, Veli Karaaslan as foreman, Rifat Çelimli and Mustafa Duman as ustas, seven other men from Menteş and two local men from Canasun village’ (French, Reference French1964a: 125); ‘We employed this year, as in previous years, Veli Karaaslan as foreman, Rifat Çelimli, Mustafa Duman, and Bekir Kalaycı as ustas; from Menteş, we employed three men and from Canasun village five men’ (French, Reference French1965: 87).
The last Canhasan report (French, Reference French1966) dates to after the problems relating to workmen selling artefacts at Çatalhöyük (Mellaart, Reference Mellaart1966: 165) and notably the old team is not mentioned: ‘For most of the season we employed about eight men from the village’ (French, Reference French1966: 113). This is the first time the workers are placed after the other team members in the acknowledgements. No workers are mentioned in the 1966 and 1967 (final) seasons.
In the excavation monographs, published several decades after the project finished, the workers are not mentioned by name, but are quantified in terms of their hours of activity and pay (Figure 6; French, Reference French1998: 16). This is the first time French mentions female workers were part of the team and is the most detailed published record of team management and budget from the period in question. Here, the hierarchy is based not only on practice but also on finance, with the foreman earning seventy-five per cent and a skilled (experienced) worker earning fifty per cent more than a basic worker. Such hierarchies of payment reflecting the role and level of skill were in place in the region from at least the late nineteenth century (Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: 147).
Figure 6. Wages for different grades of Turkish employee at Canhasan and working-day contribution of workers through the excavation seasons (French, Reference French1998: 16). © British Institute at Ankara and reproduced by their permission
Publication in Perspective: Non-Turkish and Turkish, 1960s and Twenty-First Century
In the examples cited, care is mostly taken in annual reports to mention workers as part of the teams and, in many cases, to name those considered to be the most skilled, constituting the top two layers of the hierarchical system (Figure 2; Table 1). In the final excavation publications, the reporting ranges from no mention of workers to details of the hours worked and remuneration provided, but not the identity of the individuals in question. Given the general similarities in the structuring of the teams, Beycesultan and the working regime of Seton Lloyd may be seen as the inspiration behind this constructive attitude toward workers; it encouraged and acknowledged skills and cooperation as a means to financial reward. The system quickly disappeared after problems arose at Çatalhöyük, bringing into question the trust that had built up over a decade or more.
Contemporary projects in Türkiye also run by non-Turkish missions allow us to better understand the wider attitude to workers at the time and place the early BIAA projects in context. The first truly internationally collaborative research project in Türkiye, between Istanbul and Chicago Universities in the 1960s and early 1970s (surveys and test excavations in south-eastern Anatolia, excavations at Cayönü and Girikihacyan), omits mention of local workers (Çambel & Braidwood, Reference Çambel, Braidwood, Çambel and Braidwood1980) but provides details of participating archaeologists from student level upwards. At Gordion, the trained archaeologists are listed in several preliminary reports (e.g. Young, Reference Young1951, Reference Young1953), with no mention of workmen other than anecdotally at the Midas tumulus. There, miners from Zonguldak with their own foreman were brought in and ‘set a noble example by working around the clock in three shifts, which astonished our local workmen’ (Young, Reference Young1958: 5). Preliminary reports of the Sardis excavations credit foreign trench supervisors, but barely mention workers: ‘A labor force averaging 150 (maximum 192) was employed’ (Hanfmann & Detweiler, Reference Hanfmann and Detweiler1962: 40). Although making occasional reference to team members, the Aphrodisias reports in Türk Arkeoloji Dergisi (e.g. Erim, Reference Erim1967) do not mention any workers.
Turkish-led excavations of the 1960s show similar trends, with reports from sites such as Acemhöyük (Özgüç, Reference Özgüç1967) and Tilmen Höyük (Alkın, Reference Alkın1965) making no mention of workers, although their presence is clear in the accompanying photographs. Overall, mentions are few and lack detail beyond the numbers employed. As Ottoman archaeologists seem to have adopted a similar attitude towards their workers as those of the early colonial projects (Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: 158), a similar approach among most Turkish and non-Turkish directors operating in the mid-twentieth century might be expected.
A recent ten-year sample of excavation reports of Turkish and non-Turkish teams published in the annual Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of Türkiye can be used for comparison. These represent a sample comparable to the annual interim reports in Anatolian Studies and Türk Arkeoloji Dergisi, in which the Mellaart, French, and Lloyd reports appeared. In the Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı series, all reports that appeared between 2011 and 2020 have been evaluated for mentions of different categories of project participant (Table 2). There are no officially stipulated restrictions or specific requirements relating to the recording of team members in these reports, as was also the case in the 1960s.
Table 2. Mentions of academic, non-academic, and worker (Turkish: işçi) participants or contributors in archaeological projects in reports published in Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı between 2011 and 2020. Count is by written mention, unlabelled appearances in photographs not counted. Mentions in text or footnotes are acknowledgements of team participation, thanks to team members, or description of who carried out tasks. Data is recorded as true/false, number of mentions per article are not recorded. Academic mentions include named staff and students, excluding the reports’ authors. Non-academic mentions include named individuals outside academia/professional archaeology, e.g. sponsors or local government administrators. Worker mentions are divided by mention of workers as a group and named workers. Percentage of worker mentions is according to total number of reports published in a year.
In the 2011–2020 reports, mentions of workers appear either in acknowledgements or in lists of team participants; occasionally they are referred to by individual work area within an excavation, thereby giving more prominence to the workers’ roles within a project. A typical example is ‘…bütün ekip üyelerine ve işçilerimize teşekkürü borç bilirim’ […I would like to thank all the team members and our workers] (Özügül, Reference Özügül2017: 319). In many cases, the presence of workers can be inferred without direct mention (these are therefore not included in Table 2). For example, in a report from Gordion, a photograph prominently showing two workmen directly participating in project activity is labelled ‘Fig. 6: Terrace Building 2, northwestern wall, during installation of soft capping’ (Sams & Rose, Reference Sams and Rose2012: 509). Not acknowledging any human presence removes agency from the account. In some cases, the presence of workers is implicit but not detailed in the text, ‘…yaklaşık 100 kişilik bir ekip ile (12 arkeolog, 17 arkeoloji öğrencisi, 5 mimar, 2 restoratör, 1 harita mühendisi)…’ […with a team of approximately 100 people (12 archaeologists, 17 archaeology students, 5 architects, 2 restorers, 1 survey engineer…] (Yağcı, Reference Yağcı2017: 509).
Formal report writing uses the passive voice (for example, ‘the soil was removed from area x’) to increase scientific credibility and provide a sense of objectivity or distance (Baake, Reference Baake2003: 394); but this downplays agency, removes agents, or reduces their role (see Henley et al., Reference Henley, Miller and Beazley1995; Leong, Reference Leong2020). The inclusion or non-inclusion of workers in reports, and the language or non-expression surrounding their presence, relates also more widely to the perception of the team and professionalization in archaeology. In the case of teams working abroad, it may also be strongly linked to their ‘home’ norms. Some reports specifically or implicitly include workers in the definition of the team, usually referring to ‘projeye katılan tüm ekip üyeleri’ [all team members who participated in the project], while others specifically exclude them and refer to only the bilimsel ekip [scientific team]. In some cases, there is a clear separation between the excavation team and project staff, e.g. acknowledging ‘…tüm ekibe ve çalışanlarına…’ […to the entire team and staff] (Çelikbaş & Keleş, Reference Çelikbaş and Keleş2019: 11). These various approaches relate to the wider question of the production and ownership of knowledge, who has control within that process, and whether specific training is required to acquire a certain role.
Both in-text mentions and frequency of acknowledgement (Figure 7; Table 2) show extreme disparity in the way worker participation is treated in national and international archaeological communities working in Türkiye in recent years. Overall, while just under a quarter of project reports mention the presence of workers on excavations, only 0.5 per cent over ten years name any of those workers. Comparison with the frequency of mentions of non-academics, such as sponsors or local administrators, indicates that the latter were acknowledged in a manner similar to that used for workers and not like the academically trained or semi-trained archaeologists. Considering these statistics, the worker-related detail in publications by Lloyd, Mellaart, and French in the 1950s and 1960s would be extraordinary in today's context.
Figure 7. Percentage of reports mentioning workers in Kazı Sonuçları Toplantısı between 2011 and 2020.
Discussion and Conclusion
The present-day excavation reports by both Turkish and non-Turkish teams operating in Türkiye show that the perception of team membership and how it is publicly represented varies greatly. In none of the 1170 recent archaeological reports do named workers appear before mentions of other archaeological team members or sponsors. In the 1960s, there was likewise no clear template for the treatment of workers. The Lloyd-Mellaart-French group is anomalous, showing that awareness of worker participation—an aspect widely under scrutiny today—existed in the 1960s and could be eloquently and publicly described. For Mellaart and French, ‘the performance of non-knowledge’, one of Mickel's (Reference Mickel2021: 91) major conclusions in relation to the behaviour of modern archaeological workforces, was not practised by those intending to remain in their employ in the long term. Instead, workers at all levels relied for their positions on actively demonstrating knowledge of the processes and techniques necessary to achieve the results desired by the project directors. Expectations were high in terms of knowledge, mobility, loyalty, and independent working. Those without these qualities were not invited to continue, as seen at Hacılar. French's differentiated pay scale for workers indicates that being skilled, and being known to be skilled, carried significant financial benefit, again motivating workers to demonstrate their capacity.
Several levels of belonging and trust can be identified in our mid-twentieth-century examples, and the closeness and warmth shown to a small number of individuals was dependent on their cooperation and knowledge, which ensured the success of the various excavations. The internal structures of the local work-communities that were set up on Anatolian sites remains largely unrecorded, but it is likely that, as Leighton (Reference Leighton2016) has illustrated at Tiwanaku in Bolivia, there were existing community hierarchies to be negotiated beyond the question of skill, willingness, and experience. It is clear from Mellaart's discussion of the different groups he employed and from French's wage hierarchy that intra-group relationships were complex and operated at different temporal and spatial scales. We cannot know the dynamics between the groups in the 1960s projects and whether the apparent internal hierarchies were keenly felt; nor do we know the extent to which roles and relationships were applicable in a wider region over a similar timeframe (Gillot, Reference Gillot2010: 11).
Overall, how archaeological teams in Türkiye are represented and how they are defined and perceived within and outside the field varies and is independent of temporal considerations. The 1960s was a time in which the contribution of workers to archaeology was briefly articulated in certain circles, but this attitude was not current in other projects of the time, nor in the much more recent past. The detailed recording of director–worker relationships, whether close or distant, is a phenomenon that did not catch on and remains vanishingly rare even today. This non-linear history of expression suggests that the rising awareness of multivocality and acknowledgement of different perspectives encouraged by Hodder and adopted by others (Habu et al., Reference Habu, Fawcett and Matsunaga2008) is little reflected in the local and international practices examined in our study area. The lack of reference to worker roles at any time from the 1960s onwards cannot be excused by ignorance, given that awareness existed and had been published in detail by several researchers.
We must therefore seek further explanations for the choices made by excavation directors in the way the teams were conceptualized and the manner in which knowledge was acquired during fieldwork. Recent excavation reports suggest that colonial practice is less of an issue but that knowledge control, gatekeeping of knowledge creation through formal education, and the continuing strength of hierarchical structures within academic archaeology are the main factors; all may be owed to early internal colonialization. Project archives or online spaces can now be used to address these questions, along with changes in reporting requirements. Some argue that trying to coax archaeological discourse from local workers in the name of multivocality is not necessarily appropriate. Asking workers to step outside their lived experience of culture to create an outsider perspective when archaeology and daily life are a ‘multi-sensory engagement with the material traces of the past’ (Hamilakis, Reference Hamilakis, Damaskos and Plantzos2008: 6) for them is disingenuous. Instead, archaeology was, and continues to be, a context-specific source of work and regular remuneration with a given set of knowledge or know-how. The Anatolian examples show that generalizations do not do justice to the history of archaeology (see Çelik, Reference Çelik2016: 136) and that both historical context and individual circumstance played and continue to play an important role in the reporting of relationships in archaeological fieldwork. The next step is to move beyond the stereotype of workers as the ‘silenced victims of archaeologists’ (Leighton, Reference Leighton2016: 751) and explore their past and present contributions to archaeology openly and thoroughly in a broader international context.
Acknowledgements
I offer my sincerest thanks to Alan Mellaart for access to materials from James Mellaart's personal archive and to Ellen Belcher for help with sourcing research materials.
Open access
