Turkey: Archaeologists Restart Excavations of Ancient City of Sagalassos (Turkey)

Turkey: Archaeologists Restart Excavations of Ancient City of Sagalassos (Turkey)

This season’s excavations of the ancient city of Sagalassos, located in south-western Turkey, have begun, the head of archeological research project Dr. Inge Uytterhoeven announced recently.
This year’s excavations will involve 51 workers and 75 Turkish and foreign technical personnel, Dr. Uytterhoeven, who is also a lecturer at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, told media. In addition to local professionals, the site will also benefit from the expertise of people from Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, the United States, Bulgarian and Germany.
This year, the arcaheological team’s focus will be the restoration of the Fountain of Antoninus.
Dr. Inge Uytterhoeven started working on the excavations at Sagalassos in 1997, the World Bulletin reported. She began supervising the excavations of the late antique urban mansion in the eastern domestic area of Sagalassos in 1998, after she worked on the Upper Agora North and Bouleuterion sites. Since 2002, Dr. Uytterhoeven she has been fully involved with the Sagalassos Archaeological Research Project as a post-doctoral researcher.
The ancient city of Sagalassos was first discovered by the French traveller Paul Lucas in 1706, but it would be another hundred years before its name was understood to be Sagalassos. The realization that it was one of the leading settlements of the Western Taurus came only with the discovery of the city’s name from inscriptions in 1824.
Research in the region commenced with the arrival here of an English-Belgian team for the first time in 1985, among them Marc Waelkens from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. Exactly four years after this surface investigation, the same team was given the go-ahead to undertake excavations.
Since then work at the ancient city of Sagalassos has been under way by experts from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to the efforts of a large team consisting not only of archaeologists, but of architects, engineers, restorers, landscape architects, geologists, geomorphologists, and soil engineers, a major part of the city has been brought to the light of day in the last twenty years.
The settlement’s history goes back more than 12,000 years. Sagalassos became Pisidia’s second most important city in the Hellenistic period (333-325 BC) and the city’s power was further enhanced when hegemony passed to the Roman Empire in 25 BC.

Fuente: Balkan Travellers: http://www.balkantravellers.com/en/read/article/2094