Ömür Harmansah: Architectural ethnography at Ayanis

Ayanis Ethnoarchaeological Project

Field Report on Architectural Ethnography
July 16-30, 2007
Ayanis village, Van, Turkey

Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Egyptology and Ancient Western Asian Studies
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University

Uploaded Image Photographs: Salim Dokumaci

The first official season of the TÜBİTAK-funded ethnoarchaeological project at Ayanis village (EPAV) took place in summer 2007. This is a component of the broader Ayanis Archaeological Project currently directed by Prof Altan Çilingiroğlu. Ayanis is located on the Eastern shore of Lake Van, some 35 km North of modern city of Van (See here Google Earth Satellite map). The Urartian urban settlement at Ayanis is identified with Rusahinili Eiduru-kai, built as a new foundation at the time Rusa II (ca 680-640 BC).

The ethnoarchaeological project is being carried out by an interdisciplinary team of archaeologists, geomorphologists, and anthropologists. I participated fieldwork at Ayanis for two weeks in late July, in order to carry out preliminary work on the ethnographic study of architecture and building traditions at the modern village. The main objectives of this architectural component of the project were mainly:

to investigate ethnographically the production and use of domestic spaces in the village,
to understand traditions of building technologies and spatial organization in a diachronic perspective,
to document the corpus of building knowledge in the village,
to prepare scale drawings (plan/section/detail) of the village, its building compounds and constructions systems,
to formulate and pose new archaeological questions to the excavated buildings of the Urartian outer town and citadel at Ayanis, based on the architectural ethnography of the modern village.

Uploaded Image Photograph: Altan Çilingiroğlu 2007

Some of the preliminary analysis concerning architectural practices and building traditions at Ayanis will later be summarized here. The ethnoarchaeology team at Ayanis is scheduled for a second round of fieldwork in Summer 2008. The third and final year of the project will be reserved for work on the final publication of the results.

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ViewReport on Architectural Ethnography, Summer 2007