Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  William Aylward Archaeological Discoveries at Troy  September 29, 2012 UP775  cc >> Welcome, everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. This is a special Saturday edition of Wednesday Nite at the Lab at the Wisconsin Science Festival here at UW Madison. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work at the Biotechnology Center at UW Madison. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations and our other sponsors, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, Wisconsin Public Television, and the Science Alliance here at UW Madison, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year, and I'm delighted that we get to do it here on Saturday for the second annual Wisconsin Science Festival. Today it's a great pleasure to get to introduce to you Professor William Aylward. He's an associate professor here in the Classics Department at UW Madison where he teaches archeology, mythology, and ancient Greek and Latin. He received a PhD in classical archeology from the University of Cincinnati in the year 2000. He's been involved in archeological research in ancient Greek and Roman sites in the Mediterranean since 1992. 

He has, in particular, participated in the annual expedition to Troy since 1996 where he has supervised UW Madison undergraduate research since 2002. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, his field work has involved study and publication of ancient monuments at archeological sites in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. Basically, I wish I had his job. [LAUGHTER] Today, he gets to talk about some enduring mysteries at the archeological site of ancient Troy. It's one of the great places, I think, on Earth from the point of view of the human endeavor, human literature, and now we get to see how there's this confluence here at this university and this year of innovation. Confluence between the humanities and the life sciences, a coming together of how we study the existence over thousands of years by using some of the latest technology Please join me in welcoming Professor Aylward to Wednesday Nite at the Lab here at the Wisconsin Science Festival. [APPLAUSE]  >> Thanks very much for that introduction, and thanks very much for the invitation to speak today. I've been working at Troy since 1996, and I started to take undergraduates and graduate students in 2002. And I'm really excited about the chance to share with you some of the new discoveries that we've been making at the archeological site and some of the student projects that have played out over the past decade at Troy. We're looking at a photograph of the archeological site from the south, and in the distance, behind the site about five kilometers away, is a very narrow waterway called the Dardanelles. 

And the story of Troy really begins with this narrow waterway, the Dardanelles. It's the western outlet of the Hellespont that connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and Troy's situation close to this waterway was really responsible for the rise and fall of the city over about 4500 years. Troy is unique archeological site because we have almost 4,500 years of uninterrupted settlement history. Ten cities, one stacked up on top of the next. So I'll try to walk you through the archeological layers and talk about the various cities and the different cities of Troy and talk about some of the new scientific applications that we're using to investigate the archeological remains, especially in the context of a brand new collaboration that the Troy project is embarking upon with the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.  Heinrich Schliemann was very important for archeological science. And he investigated the archeological site of Troy between 1870 and 1890. This is a cover of a supermarket tabloid that you might find in a supermarket checkout line in Germany. Schliemann's a hero in Germany for his investigations at Troy and the meticulous diaries that he kept recording his archeological discoveries and also for the sensational discoveries that he made at Troy. He was very, very much important for the establishment of archeology as an academic discipline in universities. 

He's shown here with a portrait of Helen of Troy and some of the jewelry that he found at the archeological site in 1873. Schliemann, his expedition played out between 1870 and 1890 in conjunction with a fellow named Frank Calvert who actually discovered this site first, but Schliemann had a lot of funding that he brought to the project. After Schliemann's death in 1890, his architect returned to the site in 1893 and 1894 for a couple of more years of expeditions, and then the University of Cincinnati began a campaign in the 1930s between 1932 and 1938. And then there was a 50-year hiatus. Imagine that. No archeological work at all at this important site for over 50 years until 1988. And in 1988 a new expedition was launched by the University of Tubingen in conjunction with the University of Cincinnati, and that explains my introduction to the site in 1996. And this expedition has been in place for the past 24 years. And UW Madison is about to engage in a higher order of engagement with the archeological program at Troy. Schliemann wanted to prove the historicity of the Trojan War. 

He went to Troy with the Iliad in one hand a shovel in the other hand. He was a self-made millionaire. He had lots of cash to spread around, and he was interested to solve or to reconcile the gap between myth and archeological or myth and history, what we know about the material remains of the archeological site. Myth, of course, is important in this configuration. I'm talking about the epic poems of Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey. They tell the story of the sack of Troy and the heroes in the Trojan lines, like King Priam and Prince Hector, and the Greek invaders, King Agamemnon and warriors like Achilles. Schliemann was asking these questions. Was there ever a King Priam like the King Priam portrayed in the recent 2004 film by Wolfgang Petersen by Peter O'Toole? Was there a Prince Hector who defended the walls of Troy? Was there an Achilles, portrayed by Brad Pitt in the recent film? Were there 747s? [LAUGHTER] In prehistory? [LAUGHTER] We know the answer to that question. I mentioned the Dardanelles earlier, this narrow waterway that connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. Troy, in its earliest days, the early Bronze Age period, about 3100 BC, was founded right on this waterway, probably for strategic control and maritime trade along this important waterway between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. 

If you want to go by boat between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, you must go through the Dardanelles, you must pass right by Troy. Ultimately, if you're traveling by land between Anatolia connected to Mesopotamia and the Asian continent and Europe, you must pass by Troy. There are actually two routes. One across the Bosphorus but the current is very, very strong in the Bosphorus up by Constantinople, Istanbul. That's right up there. The current is a little slower down by the Dardanelles. So if you want to cross by land between Europe and Asia, you had to pass by Troy, and we know that the ancients did this. We know that the army of Xerxes, when he was invading Greece, the Persian General, Xerxes, in 480 BC, he built pontoons across the Dardanelles, and he visited Troy. We knew when Alexander the Great invaded Persian territory in 334 BC to avenge the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, he crossed at the Dardanelles on pontoons stretched across the Dardanelles. And he visited Troy and made appropriate sacrifices to the goddess Athena who was worshipped at Troy. 

So, Troy is at an important crossroads by land and sea. And this strategic topographical location is no doubt responsible for the rise and fall of the city. The archeological site has 10 cities, one superimposed upon the next. This color phase plan assigns a different color to all the phases. Troy I is the earliest phase. That's here in gray. A stone citadel wall enclosing about an acre and a half was built about 3100 BC as a fortress on a narrow spur of land that looked out over the Dardanelles. And the city grew over the next 2,000 years in 7 iterations. So Troy I-VII are the prehistoric citadels which endured on the Trojan claim between about 3100 BC and about 1200 BC. 1200, more or less, is the general date for the final sack of the citadel of Troy. 

It marks the end of the Bronze Age across the Aegean world. Not just at Troy but also across Hittite lands and Mycenaean and Greek lands to the west. After this destruction event, there was a hiatus in activity, but then Greeks returned in the phase we call Troy VIII. Now we're in the historical period, and later Romans appeared and conquered this territory. So there's a Greek city and a Roman city built on top of the prehistoric ruin at Troy. And then there's even a Byzantine town that's the 10th city built on top of the Roman city. So 10 cities, one superimposed upon the next, at this archeological site, spanning a period of about 4,500 years. We now know that there was also a lower town in prehistory and in the Greek and Roman period, and I'll be talking more about that later. Here's another view of the same scheme, just in an artist's concept, drawing, showing the earliest phase of the city down here in the lower corner, and the nine cities, the Byzantine town isn't on this plan, but the nine principal phases from Troy I to Troy IX, ending with the Roman town depicted at the top. And in red, you'll see here this city shaded in red is shown in the expanded view here giving the picture a more or less fairly accurate representation of what we know about the heyday of the citadel in the Troy VI period. 

Troy VI is the phase standing between 1800 and 1300 BC in which, over generations, the inhabitants of the city contributed to building the mighty stone walls that defended the city. According to legend, Apollo and Poseidon lent a hand in construction of the walls so they had a divine protection about them. And these were the walls that were destroyed in an earthquake about 1300 BC or so, and then the city was in a phase of withdrawal. And we know from examining the archeological remains that a generation or two after the earthquake, in this phase of withdrawal, there was an attack on the city, and the city was burned. This might be the sack that is recorded in the epic poems of Homer about which we know from 400 years later. I want to walk you through a couple of key discoveries in recent years in two phases of the city. The Troy II phase, the second iteration, from the middle of the third millennium BC, and then I'll jump forward to the Troy VI and VII phases, the phases connected with Homer and the final sack of Troy at the end of the Bronze Age, about 1200 BC. And then I'll move on to talk about some of the new scientific applications that we're using at Troy. So this is a plan just showing the Troy II phase of the city featuring a stone fortification wall and palatial buildings on the interior of the citadel. Many of these were discovered by Schliemann in his excavations between 1870 and 1890. 

In 1996 and following, new excavations in the Troy II citadel discovered what we call a megaron. This is a palatial building of the type described by Homer. It's a domestic building, but it also functioned as a reception hall for banqueting. There's a central hearth in the middle of the room in the photograph, and archeologists are busy removing some of the material remains found on the floor of the room underneath the collapsed walls and ceiling which burned in conflagration. At some point in the middle of the third millennium BC, the Troy II city was also sacked and burned. We know less about this destruction there than we know about later destructions of the city. But the evidence for a continual destruction phase by phase across the centuries of Troy is important for understanding the precarious position that this outpost on the Dardanelles held throughout the ages. The Dardanelles have been a flash point throughout history for conflict. You'll recall the failed Gallipoli campaign of 1915 played out on the shores of right near Troy. We found many, many vessels in situ on the floor along with impressions of beaded mats around the central hearth. 

This was the gathering place for early Trojan peoples to celebrate and to talk about daily life in their city. Here's one of the drinking vessels, or a drinking vessel just like this was found in the destruction context in the megaron from Troy II. This is a better example of the same type of artifact. This is called the depas, and the same type of vessel is described by Homer. A large tankard with two broad handles. So we know that this was used in Homeric banqueting context, and we also know that it belongs to the third millennium BC at Troy. You'll notice that there's no foot on this particular drinking tankard. Once you were handed one of these at a banquet, you couldn't put it down. You had to finish everything that was inside. We also know about other aspects of the diet of the Trojans from the excavations. 

This is part of a tuna fish skeleton. So we know that in the Bronze Age they had very sophisticated boats which they would launch out in the Aegean to harvest tuna from the sea. You can't reel in a tuna fish from the shore. You have to go out and get them with sophisticated nets and boats. So, evidence from the archeological site helps us understand the diet and the life ways of the ancient Trojans. Now, fast-forwarding a thousand years up to the Troy VI period, I'll say a few things about the earthquake that destroyed the Troy VI citadel, shown here in red on the plan, and the ensuing period of the Troy VII phase. You'll notice that the citadel is much larger here. We don't know about the northern part of the city wall. This part hasn't been excavated because when Schliemann was digging in the 1870s, he dug very quickly through the middle of the mound. He wanted to get down to the Homeric levels and solve the problem of the historicity of the Trojan War so he sort of just blasted right through the mound and poured all the detritus over the northern part of the hill. 

So we know less about this area because that overburden hasn't been removed. It's just an enormous project that requires lots of funding and Earth moving commitment. That hasn't happened yet at Troy. But one day someone will do this and they will find protected closed deposits from the northern slope of the hill from the day that Schliemann was there, undisturbed even by the Schliemann excavations. So there's lots more to do at Troy. You'll also notice that we know less about the middle of the Troy VI citadel. There's not palace preserved in the middle of the Troy VI city because when the Greek and Roman builders arrived at Troy, they flattened off the top of the mound because they wanted to build a brand new temple to Athena and monumentalize the town. So they destroyed, long ago, any evidence that might have been there of a palace occupied by King Priam. But we know quite a lot about the fortification wall and the buildings right inside the fortification wall. You'll notice that they're set back from the inside of the fortification wall. 

There's a narrow alleyway between the buildings and the wall, and we know from excavations in the foundation trenches that the wall was built over generations. It was a project that took many centuries to build. So many, many generations of Trojans would have been involved in building the walls, and they would have had a special connection to the walls as they rose around the new city which enclosed an area of about six acres and what was probably occupied by a thousand or more inhabitants. The wall was built in phases, starting at the northeast here and built section by section around the town until the western side. And you'll also notice that the towers were built up here, here, and here against the walls. We know that they were built against the walls after the circuit wall was completed. But they didn't finish. The walls were incomplete at the time of the earthquake. You'll notice that there's a gateway on the western side of the citadel that is unprotected by a gate. The normal defensive configuration here would involve a gateway protected by a flanking tower. 

They never got around to building that tower on the west gate. So the building project was interrupted by the earthquake which destroyed the town. In the following generations, the walls were rebuilt. This was the mightiest wall the Troy had ever had so it was worth reusing the fortifications in later generations. The walls stood over 30 feet high. They were over 12 feet thick with solid interlocking masonry stones that were specially carved, quarried from local limestone quarries. They have a sloping facade and vertical offsets. Here's one of the vertical offsets here. And there's another vertical offset there. And you can see here how the towers were added up against the wall. 

There is a very distinct masonry joined there. The wall is on this side, and the tower is over here that was added later. These were very distinct from Mycenaean Greek defensive architecture, contemporary with Troy on the Greek mainland, and very distinct from Hittite masonry. The Hittites were the other super power of the ancient world in the second millennia BC. Hittite masonry and Mycenaean Greek masonry is very different than Trojan masonry. So, when we look at the defensive architecture of Troy, we know that we're looking at a very discrete cultural entity here occupying the very northwestern part of what was ancient Anatolia. This is an artist's concept drawing showing what the walls might have looked like with palatial buildings inside the walls and architecture outside the walls. We know that there was a lower town in the Troy VI phase, and the inhabitants of buildings in the lower town might have had the occasion to seek refuge inside of the walls. They were readily available for them. This drawing shows quite a bit of information about which we know quite a lot. 

The paved street that leads into the southern part of the citadel is very well preserved. The four -- here outside the gate stood outside the gate as, perhaps, protective symbols or warning devices for opponents who would approach the city walls. This is the situation in the Troy VI city. When Troy had its largest, or, let's say, furthest trade contacts, artifacts from Minoan Crete appear at Troy, Baltic amber is found at Troy, even artifacts from Mesopotamia are found at Troy. So, in the middle of the second millennium BC, Troy was really a super power controlling this important waterway between north and south. After the earthquake, the inhabitants of Troy set about right away to rebuild walls, but the settlement of Troy only lasted a few generations. Shortly after the earthquake, the citadel was sacked and burned, probably by invaders, but we don't have any, let's say, real concrete clues about the identity of the attackers. We know that the Trojans were in contact with the Mycenaean Greeks, and according to Homeric legend a Greek armada from the mainland sails across the Aegean and sacks the city. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this idea of a western invasion of the archeological site. But there are still gaps in our knowledge about the identity of the invaders. 

The western gate is featured here in this detail. And you can see here how the Troy VI wall, shown in red, was blocked up with a gateway in the Troy VII period, marked in green. The city was in a stage of withdrawal. You'll also notice that buildings were built right up against the inside of the fortification wall. Those are identified in green on the plan. That was not the case for the Troy VI way of life in the city. So there's a new architectural development in the city that involves buildings built very hastily, with different materials with narrower foundations and more space for food storage. And it's the increased volume of food storage in the Troy VII citadel that suggests to excavators that the city was in a phase of withdrawal and added defensive mind set and was probably facing a siege from a foreign invader. Schliemann and Blagan and other excavators hoards of stones stored up in the corners of walls along the gateways on the insides of the walls. This was the way that the defenders of the city walls defended their town with sophisticated slings hurdling stones down on the attackers. 

We also find evidence for bronze arrowheads and other armaments. The excavations of Schliemann and Blagan didn't discover skeletal remains of those who might have lost their lives in the final attack of the city. It was common, we know from Homer and other sources, for survivors to retrieve the bodies of the dead and give them proper burial elsewhere. So it's not surprising that we don't have too much human skeletal evidence from the sack of the city at the end of the Bronze Age. This color plan attempts to show the geopolitics of the Aegean world at the end of the Bronze Age. In Orange, off in Anatolia on the far side of the screen over here, the Hittite empire had risen to power across the second millennium BC. And Troy, it might have been the case that Troy was the vassal kingdom of the Hittites off in the east. Over in the mainland and on the islands of the Aegean, the Mycenaean empire was rising to power. And, at some point at the end of the Bronze Age, these two super powers were looking at Troy, were looking to try to control Troy for the important strategic position that it occupied on the Dardanelles. We all know the romantic story of Helen of Troy, that Prince Paris sailing off to Sparta and kidnapping the wife of Menelaus and taking her back to the city and offending the Greeks, thereby causing the Greek expedition to get underway. 

A more realistic situation to explain the final sack of the city of Troy can be found in the economic situation and the geopolitics of the Aegean and Troy sandwiched between these two super powers, the Hittite world in the east and Mycenaean Greek empire in the west. We would know more about this if we had writing from the archeological site of Troy, but we don't have any writing from the Bronze Age. And this is a major gap in the material remains from Troy. New excavations at the site can attempt to find an archive room of the very same type that has been found at the Hittite palace of Hattusha in central Anatolia from about 1300 BC, clay tablets accidentally baked in the final destruction of the Hittite palace. Perhaps the overlords of Troy in the 13th century BC preserve the writing, the writing of eastern civilizations, and these tablets refer to a place called Wilusa. This might have been a Hittite name for Troy. And they refer to a prince. This might be the Alexander, also known as Paris, from Trojan legend. So we have Hittite documents from the palace civilizations in the east. We have Mycenaean Greek documents from the Mycenaean Greek world of the west. 

Palaces like Pylos and -- controlled by the Mycenaean Greeks in the 14th and 13th centuries BC provide important evidence for what was going on at the palace and palatial life. Primarily, there are lists of commodities, what types of food and armaments are in store at the palace in the Mycenaean world. But we don't have any such palace archive from the world of the Trojans. Hundreds and hundreds of Mycenaean tablets have been found at palaces in Greece and very many cuneiform documents have been found in the Hittite world, but no written evidence for Trojan civilization in the Bronze Age. We can't mention Linear B without mentioning Emmett Bennett, who passed away in December of 2011. He was on the faculty for 30 years at the University of Wisconsin, and he contributed some of the foundational work in the 1940s and early 1950s that led to the decipherment of Linear B in 1952 by John Chadwick and Michael Ventris. A very important discovery for Aegean Bronze Age studies. On the screen here is the only piece of Bronze Age writing that we have from Troy, and it's from the Troy VII B phase just after the final sack of the city. And it's from a context that's slightly disturbed, so it might actually belong to an earlier phase and had been redeposited in a later phase. It's a small, bronze seal. 

It's about this big. And it bears the name of a scribe on one side and the name of his consort on the other side. It's pierced so it would have been worn around a wrist or a neck as an amulet but also as a signature seal that could have been impressed in clay to leave the signature of a particular individual. It's written out, the script is Luwian hieroglyphics. And Luwian is a western dialect of Hittite cuneiform. So if we're just looking at the sole piece of evidence, it's a very small and scrappy piece of evidence for writing at Troy, we can make connections with Trojan civilization and the world of the Hittites to the east.  I want to turn our attention now to some of the new scientific applications that we've used to investigate Troy and the hinterland. Geomorphology is one of these. Hundreds and hundreds of boreholes have been drilled in the Trojan plain to try to understand the landscape in the Bronze Age, and on the screen here is a phase plan showing what we now know about the situation of Troy in the early Bronze Age. Troy is located here, and it appears, it's now apparent that Troy was much closer to the sea when the city was initially founded, about 3100 as a small fortress, than it is today. 

Today, the ruin is about five kilometers from the coastline. But deltaic progradation involving sediments in the Scamander River Valley to south here and the Simoa River Valley to the north here contributed to the advancement of the shoreline away from the city. Throughout the ages, the landscape became very marshy, and in Roman times the city really wasn't that important. It was eclipsed by other important Roman colonial foundations elsewhere in the area. But in the Bronze Age, it was much closer to the sea, which would have added to the value of this place for control over the Dardanelles to the north. Other methods for investigation at Troy involved magnetometry and georadar. These remote sensing techniques allow us to take pictures of what's underground before we excavate. They are important because they are non-intrusive methods and they can guide our excavations. It is very important to pause and think before you put a shovel in the ground and start digging because you're going to find something, and what are you going to do with the things that you find? You better be prepared with a conservation lab and storage repositories and an armada of scholars who can study the material and conserve the material for posterity. So remote sensing techniques allow us to think about and strategize excavation techniques for archeological sites like Troy. 

We've been looking at the citadel of Troy here. It turns out that the city was much larger than Schliemann ever imagined because the plateau to the south, extending about 400 meters to the south of the city and also over to the east, was also occupied in the Bronze Age in the period of Troy VI and probably Troy VII too and in Greek and Roman times with a lower city or a lower settlement. And we know this from magnetometry. This is a magnetogram completed with cesium fluxgate magnetometry methods, and you can see quite clearly the street plan of the Roman town which lies about one to two meters beneath the surface with large housing blocks or --. These had about 10 to 15 houses per unit. And they had very well paved streets. And test excavations in the landscape of the lower town have shown that the magnetogram is, indeed, correct that there's a Roman city there. Underneath the Roman town, there's evidence for another street grid from the Greek Hellenistic phase of the city about 4th and 3rd centuries BC. And then beneath that there's evidence for the Bronze Age lower town. And this is important for understanding the life ways and the defensive architecture at the site of Troy through the ages. 

Here are some UW Madison students helping with the radar machines at Troy. It's hooked up to a laptop computer which is receiving GPS signals so everything is synchronized in time and space for that mosaic picture of what lies beneath. The test activations in one are of the lower city were guided by an anomaly, a very strange anomaly that appeared on the magnetogram. It was sort of a wavy line. It wasn't straight. It didn't conform to the Greek street plan. It didn't conform to the Hellenistic street plan, and these excavations, these test excavations are along this anomaly, which are very pinpoint excavations, very economical in the way that they intervened in the archeological landscape. They showed that there was a rock-cut ditch and palisade system at the southern edge of the lower city that dated to the Bronze Age period, and this suggested an outer line of defense, a second line of defense beyond the stone citadel wall for added defensibility at the archeological site. And some of the, you can see the rock-cut ditch here showing up in these trenches at the southern edge of the lower city. Here's the rock cutting behind the large ditch for the wooden palisade wall. 

This is an excavation area that's two meters deep. Here is the overburden from the Greek and Roman city above. And here, down on the bedrock, excavators revealed the rock-cut line of the palisade wall right at a gateway. So the postholes here were for the post for the gate and here and here, and here's the line for the fence and this area was uncut because that was for a gateway into the lower town. Here's an artist's concept drawing showing the situation of the bedrock cuttings. There's the wooden palisade wall. The construction of what the wooden palisade wall would have looked like. There's the ancient overburden. The diggers of the rock-cut trench would have dug through the Earth first and then down into the bedrock. The bedrock ditch is three meters wide and one meter deep, but that's just the bedrock. 

It would have been much deeper because of the overburden, the soil on top of the bedrock in antiquity. And here's a situational drawing showing how the gateway might have functioned with a rock-cut ditch in front of a palisade wall to forestall and keep at bay the wheel-borne attackers, attackers on chariots, or even sophisticated battering ram technology. We know that ancient Assyrians, for example, from the 11th and 10th century BC had very sophisticated battering rams, large wooden contraptions. They're preserved in the artwork of the ancient Assyrians from the east. And the Trojans and the Hittites and Mycenaean Greeks certainly knew about these things. Indeed, the whole idea of the Trojan horse, a large wooden contraption wheeled up to the walls of Troy, might be a metaphor for a battering ram that would have been used to destroy city walls like those at Troy. We know from other techniques, such as surface survey, just a simple collection of pot shards that are lying on the tops of fields that are tilled on an annual basis, we know that there was a concentration of inhabitation in the middle of the lower town. We've been talking about the citadel here. Here's the evidence for the lower ditch and palisade wall that defended the lower town, and the surface survey of pot shards and artifacts just on the surface of the ground have shown a dense concentration of inhabitation here from the Troy VI period and also over in this area. So it might have been the case that the ditch and palisade continued around the eastern side of the city and then looped back around enclosing an area of about 50 acres. 

So the citadel in the Troy VI period, about six acres in size with a lower town of about 50 acres. Perhaps room enough for as many as 10,000 inhabitants. I want to share with you now some of the student projects that undergraduates are contributing to the archeology of Troy. This is Geoffrey Ludvik on the screen shown last year using dental impression putty to investigate the drill holes in drilled artifacts in stone from the archeological site. This dental impression putty is brought back to the laboratory here, and the impressions are analyzed with a scanning electron microscope. And Geoffrey has been able to determine, in conjunction with the research that he's conducting with Professor Mark Kenoyer in the Department of Anthropology, that some of the drill impressions of the beads found at Troy belong to Mesopotamian techniques. They might even be as far as the Indus Valley. Not necessarily the beads but the drill technology that was used to drill the holes in the beads of which were used for jewelry, personal adornment. This is a Troy II bead from the middle of the third millennium BC in Carnelian. It's broken in half, but the dental impression putty inserted into the drill hole and then examined under the scanning electron microscope, here magnified 25 times and a hundred times, can reveal very particular details of the drilling technology that was used to drill the bead, such as the type of drill bit that was used, and if the bead was drilled from one direction or from both directions into the middle. 

William Marks, another undergraduate at Troy. He graduated in 2010, is now a graduate student at Columbia University. He helped us with an x-ray fluorescence scanning program to determine elemental identification of pigments that were used to decorate artifacts at Troy. He's shown here with Donna Strahan, conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, conducting x-ray fluorescence scans on a statue of Hadrian, a marble statue of Hadrian, the emperor Hadrian. He visited Troy in 124 AD. They didn't find any traces of paint on the statue, which suggests that maybe the statue was unfinished because oftentimes these marble statues were painted. But he didn't find evidence for elements that were used in the coloration of wall painting from the buildings at Troy. We know that mercury was the element used to color public buildings in an area we know as the west sanctuary from the Hellenistic period, but that Iron was the preferred source of red for houses that were used in domestic context in the Roman town. We also know that tin was used as a surface covering for clay terra cotta tiles that were used as votive dedications in sanctuaries at Troy. These small terra cotta tiles here on the screen feature iconography of the gods like the caduceus of Hermes or the quiver of Apollo or the knot of Hercules. 

And these small terra cotta tablets were dedicated in sanctuaries to the gods, and we know something that's not apparent to the naked eye. We know that they were decorated with a tinfoil covering, probably to give the impression of a faux silver and added value to these dedications made to the gods. This is Greg Barrett-Wilt, a postdoctoral scientist at the Biotechnology Center, conducting chemical residue analyses or harvesting samples from chemical residue analyses from huts at the archeological site of Troy. This is the toe of an amphora or a wine storage vessel found in the west sanctuary at Troy in a banquet in context. And this is a fineware Roman cup from the dining table of the Roman occupants at Troy and chemical residue analyses from the interiors of these vessels, especially along the sides and bottom will be able to shed light on the types of food in a very specific way. The specific type of grape used to make the wine. The specific type of olive used to make the olive oil, for example, in these analyses. This is work that was playing out just a couple of months ago at Troy, and the samples collected have just arrived here at UW, and they'll be taken over the mass spectrometry facility for examination in this new project focused on chemical residue. David Meiggs, on the screen here, is a postdoc in anthropology here at UW, an honorary fellow in the Biotechnology Center, and he is engaged in a project to study the life ways and migration patterns of inhabitants at Troy moving between east and west and north and south across this important crossroads in antiquity using strontium isotope analyses. He's shown here collecting tooth enamel from some of the prehistoric inhabitants at Troy. 

We have a very rich skeletal collection of human skeletal remains from the city, and if you consume well water, then preserved in your bones is a strontium isotope signature which can be correlated with the geology of a particular area. So strontium isotope analyses help us understand migration patterns. David is a former student of Professor Doug Price in the Department of Anthropology who was one of the pioneers of this methodology. This is Rich Schaumberg, honorary fellow from the Biotechnology Center, who's shown here collecting animal bone remains for another scientific application that we're just beginning to apply at Troy, and this involves paleogenomics. We're trying to look at, in a paleogenomic way, the life ways and the ecology and biology of the landscape around Troy by looking very closely at the skeletal remains for people and animals at the archeological site. We find over and over again individual burials or small clusters of burials at the archeological site. Here are some excavations ongoing in a cemetery, a small cemetery uncovered in 2009 from the Troy V period. This is a grave of a woman 25 to 30 years old from this cemetery. And we continue to search at Troy and around the city of Troy for the royal citadel of the Trojan elite who must have occupied the citadel and they must have had a cemetery somewhere around the city. This is another major gap in our knowledge. 

Writing is one of them, writing from Troy is one of them, and the location of the royal cemetery of the late Bronze Age is something that also has eluded the spades of archeologists who have worked at Troy. We're embarking on a paleogenomics project at Troy to try to understand the life ways of the ancient Trojans, and part of this project will be trying to discover the royal cemetery of the ancient Trojans to reveal for us aspects about the life ways of the ancient Trojans, gene flow between Asia and Europe in the third and second millennia BC. There are a lot of curiosities in the skeletal remains from Troy, so it's worth taking a second look at the skeletal remains not only from a forensic anthropological look but also at the paleogenomic level. For example, this is a burial of a male, 25 to 30 years old, from the western part of the citadel showing evidence for trephination, an ancient surgical technique actually developed on the Arabian peninsula in the fifth millennium BC but used in the Bronze Age at Troy. This is a surgical intervention. You can see here's the full burial, and here's the skull from the archeological remains. Here's the restored skull, and here's the detail of the surgical site. This trephination was used to relieve pressure on the brain. We know in this particular case that the individual survived this surgical technique but not very long. There's only minor evidence for healing along the surgical site. 

So we know that the ancients were employing these sophisticated surgical techniques. We don't know much about the head injury that was sustained by this particular individual. We also have evidence for tubercles. These were lung tubercles from a Byzantine grave dated to the 12th century AD, and by examining pathogens and the DNA or artifacts of DNA in the bones and tubercles from skeletons at Troy, we hope, also, to shed light on the evolution and development of pathogens that affected the life ways of the ancient Trojans. I want to start to steer towards a conclusion to this presentation by focusing on the legacy of Troy and the legacy of the Homeric legends by sharing with you a few discoveries that belonged to the period following the Bronze Age, following the final sack of the city, and these shed light on ways that later Greek and Roman occupants of the city and those who are living in the Mediterranean world celebrated Trojan legend and kept the enduring mysteries about Hector and Achilles and King Priam alive for later generations and indeed contributed to why we continue today to be fascinated by the legends of Troy, the epic poems of Homer, and the archeological site of Troy. This is one of the earliest depictions of the Trojan horse. It belongs to the 8th century BC. It's from a grave site on Mykonos, an island in the middle of the Cyclades in Greece. And it's from the very earliest reappearance of monumental art, monumental representational art in Greece in the 8th century BC when civilization reemerged on the landscape. And one of the earliest motifs that artists applied to their decorated pots were scenes of the Trojan War. 

It had been on their minds. It must have been on their minds for the intervening centuries, the so-called Dark Ages of Greece for which we have little information, but as soon as civilization reemerged in Greece, Trojan legend and images of the Trojan horse were some of the first scenes that appear on early Greek art. This one is rather cute because we can see right through the body of the horse to the attackers. If there ever had been a Trojan horse, it was supposed to be a ruse, but how else would you know that it's the Trojan horse. So it's a little artistic license used there. We know that the inhabitants of Troy, after the sack at the end of the Bronze Age, were Greek speakers, and they sought to promote their Hellenic identity. Indeed, they built a monumental temple to Athena on the acropolis, and, as a model for their monumental temple in marble, they looked at the Parthenon. This is one of several sculptural relief decorations in marble, that adorned the temple at Troy. It shows the sun god Helios embarking out on his day's journey across the sky, setting out in the morning, and it frames a scene battle, probably between the Greeks and Trojans which was used on the temple at Troy. And this would have emulated the presentation of the very same scene on the Parthenon shown here in Athens. 

The quintessential Hellenic temple for the 5th century BC and generations following. We know from around the site of Troy there are very many tomb mounds. Some of these belonged to the Bronze Age; some of these belonged to the historical period. This is a drawing and a photograph of the same tumulus. The drawing is from Schliemann's era, and the photograph is modern day. This is to the south of Troy, a monumental tumulus, inside of which are burials. The heroes of the Trojan War were interred in these large monuments for all to appreciate in later periods of history. We know that when Alexander the Great visited Troy, he visited some of these tomb mounds. And we were told he ran naked around the tomb mounds to celebrate the fact that he was taking the legacy of Achilles and attacking the Persians. From these tombs, there have been some very spectacular discoveries in recent years. 

This is a marble sarcophagus from a tumulus to the east of Troy, and it was robbed in antiquity so part of it is broken away there by ancient robbers who destroyed part of the mound and found this, but they didn't destroy the artwork on the exterior of the marble coffin which shows the sacrifice of Polyxena. This is one of the earliest known sculptural sarcophagi from the ancient world. It belongs to the end of the 6th century BC, and it features almost life-sized characters here. This is Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles who returns to Troy after the death of Achilles to avenge the death of his father and demand the blood sacrifice of a Trojan princess. There she is, Polyxena, being held by the henchmen of Neoptolemus, and the sacrifice plays out before the tumulus of Achilles, shown in the background here, on the plain at Troy. So, the later Greeks and Romans who lived in the landscape around Troy sought to promote Trojan legend to try to connect themselves to this lost age of heroes and to promote the importance of this archeological site. Another sarcophagus has painted decoration. This is found from another tomb just outside of Troy. This features a Persian rider attacking a Greek king. And this helps us understand how the landscape around Troy in the 4th century BC, that's the date of this artifact, was a zone of conflict between Greek interests and Persian interests over this territory. 

When the Romans lived at Troy, they issued coins that celebrated Trojan legend. These are reversed types, or tails, of Roman coins from Troy showing images of Apollo and Poseidon building the walls of Troy. Here is the judgment of Paris, Prince Paris judging who was the fairest among the Greek goddesses. Aphrodite wins the contest. Here's Hector defending the ships, attacking the Greek ships at Troy over here. This one. And then here's a battle between Greeks and Trojans. So the Romans also sought to connect themselves to ancient Troy. And Roman emperors visited Troy. We find portraits of them in marble. 

Augustus visited Troy in 20 BC. This portrait was found a few years ago. A portrait of Hadrian was found. He visited Troy in 124 AD. Troy was very important for the Roman empire because the Romans believed that the descended from the line of Aeneas. Aeneas, as told in the legend of the Aeneid, the epic poem by Virgil of the last 1st century BC. Aeneas was the only survivor, the adult male survivor, of the conflagration that burned Troy to the ground, and he escaped the burning walls of Troy and sailed across the Mediterranean world and found the Roman line. And the Romans never forgot that. It's a fancy story, of course. It's myth. 

But they promoted the myth to promote their own connection to the age of heroes and the heroic past. Even in the 20th century, Trojan legend lives. This is the Laocoon, the famous Roman period statue now in the Vatican. Laocoon, entwined by the snakes, and that's used as a model for a political commentary involving Nixon and the Watergate tapes. There's Laocoon. He's a Trojan prince who warned the Trojans not to take the horse inside the walls, but they didn't listen to him. The horse was so beautiful they didn't listen to him. And Poseidon sent serpents from the sea to strangle and silence Laocoon, and the Trojans took that as evidence that Laocoon was lying when, in fact, he was trying to warn them about Greeks bearing gifts. If you go to Troy today, Trojan legend lives on. You can visit the Helen of Troy beauty contest. 

[LAUGHTER] Which takes place on the slopes of Mount Ida every summer. And you can see the plastic prop that was used in the 2004 Wolfgang Petersen film now situated on the harbor in a major town located near Troy. This is the situation of the horse from the 2004 movie, given as a gift from Hollywood to the Republic of Turkey. Troy almost burned again in 2008. There was a forest fire and smoke rose on the horizon and threatened the archeological site of Troy. Flames approached the city but didn't destroy it. This is an important reminder to us that archeological sites like Troy are threatened. They need important stewardship, and they need protection by scientists who can study the remains, excavate the remains, and continue to understand and promote this aspect of world heritage, of cultural heritage for a 21st century audience. Thanks very much for your attention today. [APPLAUSE]