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At one of the most important archaeological sites in the Near East, remains of antiquity’s dead breathe more life into professor’s scholarship and classrooms

Students in Elspeth Dusinberre’s “Trash and Treasure, Temples and Tombs” classes can see her online course material with this pithy login: “Ya gotta dig.”

That pun encapsulates the depth of her art-and-archaeology course, her dedication to archaeology, her passion for antiquity, her sense of humor.

Literally, archaeologists dig for clues about ancient cultures. Figuratively, they mine previously published research. And, the whole thing is so exciting, you’ve just gotta dig it.

Dusinberre, professor of classics and President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, did some careful digging this summer at Gordion in present-day Turkey, one of the most important archaeological sites in the Near East.

Now she’s returned to ����������-Boulder, where her experiences will broaden, deepen and vivify her teaching, or—as she prefers to put it—students’ learning.

Dusinberre had been invited to complete the study of a series of burial mounds, called tumuli, at Gordion. Her task: to finish the manuscript begun by the late Ellen Kohler, an eminent scholar who was part of a team of University of Pennsylvania archaeologists who began excavating the site in 1950.

On the Gordion tumuli, Kohler “did an enormous amount of important and meticulous work,” Dusinberre says. “I’m going back to re-examine the artifacts from the burials, finish recording them, see what we have learned since she was last able to work on them and then complete the publication.”

Archaeologists have found artifacts of Alexander the Great and King Midas (an eighth-century BCE ruler and source of the legendary golden touch) at Gordion. It is where the Alexander cut the Gordion Knot, which was said to have been tied by Midas and was prophesized to be unraveled only by the future ruler of Asia.

Additionally, Gordion was inhabited through several epochs, including the Bronze Age, which began there about 2500 BCE, and Iron Age, which began about 1200 BCE. It was ruled by Phrygians, Persians, Greeks and Romans and influenced by numerous cultures.

“It’s got a long and complicated history,” Dusinberre notes.

The tumuli at Gordion—mounds of earth covering the remains of important people—are numerous and sometimes huge. ���������� 100 of them exist in and around Gordion, and the largest, now believed to have been built for Midas’ father, King Gordius, is 165 feet tall and about 980 feet in diameter at its base. That tomb’s chamber is the world’s oldest known standing wooden building.

Dusinberre studied the contents of the tumuli covering cremation burials. Mortuary deposits are particularly revealing about ancient societies, she says.

Because everything in a burial was deposited at once, “that gives you sort of a time capsule or a window into a very specific moment.” It lets you see what objects were available for use at the same time.

Further, burials yield an unusually good snapshot of what mattered to a once-living society.

"How we care for our dead and what we do with the remains of people whom we loved say a lot about what matters to us and our culture.”

“How we care for our dead and what we do with the remains of people whom we loved say a lot about what matters to us and our culture,” Dusinberre adds.

Eleven cremation burials at Gordion date between about 625 BCE and 530 BCE. Their contents are “spectacular.”

Dusinberre has worked previously at Gordion and other sites in Turkey, as well as elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. Her three published books include “Gordion Seals and Sealings: Individual and Society.” This is not her first rodeo.

It was nonetheless novel.

“In class when you’re teaching archaeology, you tell your students, blithely, ‘Oh, well, if you find or if you see whole objects, they probably come from a tomb.’”

“This was my first experience looking at mortuary deposits, and it was jaw-dropping to recognize that that truism is true. You find whole objects, and you find lots of them, and you find them in a meaningful kind of deposit,” Dusinberre says.

“I would wake up at night because the moon was full and the owls were hunting. And I couldn’t go back to sleep because I was just too excited about all this amazing stuff.”

Tumuli seem to be monuments to power. “It’s a big effort to make these mounds … a huge amount of work without bulldozers.”

Funeral banquets and safety pins

Tumulus F dates to about 620 BCE and included a collection of funerary cooking and eating pots. They were interred with the deceased.

This “last supper assemblage” has not yet been chemically analyzed to determine what kind of food the people ate, but that would be a next step.

The find is exciting partly because feasts draw humans together. “We dine together in ways that are meaningful all the time.” In this case, there’s an implication of banqueting with the dead, and banquets are also part of many funeral traditions today.

“It matters to us now, and it mattered then,” Dusinberre observes.

Another tomb, Tumulus I, contained “safety pins,” one bronze and the other silver, each about an inch across. Bronze safety pins are a feature of Phrygian society and served in part as status symbols.

A later tomb, Tumulus M, was constructed about the time Gordion was conquered by the Persian Empire, the focus of most of Dusinberre’s research. That tomb contained pieces of a bronze bowl.

Both the handle and the rim of the bronze vessel resemble the design elements found on the “safety pins,” called fibulae, a Phrygian hallmark with a long history.

“They really like this notion of how to decorate things, and they hang onto it for ages. I love the fact that they’re still burying bronze bowls with people around 550 (BCE) the way they had been doing for several centuries already. The burials show a strong continuing sense of what it meant to identify as Phrygian.”

The Persian conquest of Gordion leaves a mark on burial traditions. After the Persian annexation, only a few tumuli continue to be constructed at Gordion. And their contents change. That’s surprising, in some ways.

“Even more surprising to me, and I don’t understand this at all, is the scarcity of Persian-period tumuli. Virtually everywhere else in Anatolia, after the Persians arrive, there are more tumuli constructed. At Gordion, they basically stop,” Dusinberre says.

From about 530 until after the end of the Persian period around 330, there’s a hiatus in tumuli.

“The fact that there’s this shift in how people treat their dead loved ones suggests something significant may have happened, and what that is I don’t know.”

Persians bring changing rites

Dusinberre studied artifacts from two burials from the Persian period. Tumulus E included two pits. One contained a lot of bronze and other metals. The other one had a collection of bones.

The metal-deposit pit included the iron fittings for a two-wheeled cart, with leaden rings for horses’ reins. It also had little delicate bronze vessels for pouring wine, plus two bronze cauldrons, which would have been downright old-fashioned by 530.

There are few sites where metal gets preserved this well, Dusinberre notes. So finding bronze cauldrons there sets Gordion apart from other places.

The other pit held the remains of at least nine horses and cattle, arranged in concentric circles. In these two areas were found the remains of five different horse bits (which are placed in a horse’s mouth, held in place by a bridle, and allow a rider to communicate with a horse via reins).

One particularly striking horse bit is an elaborate piece of fashioned metal that included a ram’s-head rein ring. Someone on the ground would see these “super fancy cheek pieces,” with “two little fierce rams’ heads pointing at you along with the horse coming barreling at you. Wow!”

Why do this? “I think this is one of those massive power statements.”

Other tumuli at Gordion contain horses’ remains, but Tumulus E is unusually elaborate. Dusinberre says the horses and cauldrons are reminiscent of Homeric funerary rites. The funeral games of Patroclus described at the end of the Iliad include horse races and horse sacrifice to Patroclus, and the elaborate prizes that are given to the people who win the chariot race in his honor include tripod cauldrons.

“I doubt that it’s a specific reference to Book 23 of the Iliad, but it’s interesting in terms of how it embodies a heroic culture and death.”

Another burial from about 530, Tumulus A, was probably for a woman, possibly a young woman. The tumulus included the iron fittings of a four-wheeled vehicle, very carefully disassembled and stacked.

Additionally, Tumulus A has “some of the most spectacular inclusions I’ve ever seen.”

One is a cosmetic jar called a lydion, which originated in Lydia to the west of Gordion.

Additionally, there is an ivory drinking cup. Encircled with golden-colored bands, the cup also has an ivory hue. Near the top, a golden image of a duck or a goose with its head down is shown following another that looks over its shoulder at the first.

Also in Tumulus A is a bracelet of a type commonly found in the Persian Empire. “This is a unifying power statement for the elite across the empire no matter what their ethnicity or gender,” Dusinberre says.

What distinguishes Tumulus A is that unlooted tombs of the Persian-period elite are very rare, and then “to see things like this that fit absolutely into the standard repertoire of elite trappings is exciting.”

Unresolved questions, renewed enthusiasm

It is also, as Dusinberre notes, intriguing, prompting questions such as these:

"What’s extra exciting is that archaeology gets to be truly collaborative. … There is no way any one person could know enough to do it.”

What did it mean to be living at Gordion at 530 when only a generation earlier it had not been part of the Persian Empire? What do you look like if you’re establishing your wealth and status? What does it mean if at this site, there’s a young person buried with things that look Persian, Egyptian, Lydian and “things that link her in some ways to everything going on across the million square miles of the western Persian Empire?”

Such questions will not and cannot be answered by a single scholar. “What’s extra exciting is that archaeology gets to be truly collaborative. … There is no way any one person could know enough to do it,” Dusinberre says.

When discussing Gordion, necessary expertise spans Assyrian texts, Greek literature, art history, anthropology, paleozoology, paleobotany and other disciplines.

“When people who really know what they’re talking about come together, you can create and present something that will be a valuable contribution to our understanding of this window of human history, at a time when things were very tumultuous and uncertain at Gordion.”

One might wonder how the thrill of research translates into excellent teaching, for which Dusinberre has won 10 awards at ����������-Boulder.

She says it is both “joyful and important to be doing research as well as teaching.”

“It allows me to be up on the most recent developments in different areas that are not my specialty, but that I might learn about through working with colleagues.”

“I also think it keeps one from ossifying. If you are teaching the same class multiple times, or indeed the same subject multiple years, then learning new things about it matters a lot.”

“I think what matters most in the classroom is to be fresh. … Ongoing research is not the only way to be a good teacher. But it’s one of the ways that can make learning vivid and vital for the students.”

It’s one way, in short, for teachers to break new ground.

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Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations for the College of Arts and Sciences.