Archaeological excavation is a slow and painstaking process, and these flights over the vast urban landscape of Sardis drive home the difficulty of understanding even a small region of the ancient city solely through digging. For example, in the 19 seasons that we have been digging on ByzFort and Field 49, we have excavated in about 4% of the area we estimate the Lydian palace quarter to have occupied; and because we are excavating not only one city, but a layer-cake of many cities stacked on top of each other, it can take many years to dig through each one . At that rate we could dig the palace by about the year 2500. Clearly we want to use other techniques besides excavation to direct further research and to allow us to generalize and better understand the excavation that has already been done.
Geophysical prospection has been used at Sardis since 1961, when David Greenewalt, brother of the former director Crawford H. Greenewalt, jr., did resistivity surveys of the city site and of mounds at Bin Tepe. Those surveys were not particularly successful, but more recent research has employed a wider variety of sophisticated techniques. In this flight in 2018, Prof. Dr. Mahmut Drahor of 9. September University in Izmir leads his team in using a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to survey part of Field 49. GPR has generally been more successful than other techniques in identifying archaeological remains such as stone walls in the deep and complex stratigraphy of Sardis, as it gives a series of “depth slices” that reveal anomalies at different depths, down to about 4-5 m below surface. Prof. Dr. Drahor has also used two-dimensional electrical resistivity tomography, induced polarization tomography, seismic refraction P tomography, and multi-channel surface wave tomography in this area.
Our flight begins by following geophysicists Mahmut Drahor, Buğra Oğuz Kaya, Hakan Aycan, and others drag the orange GPR antenna across the top of Field 49. For Sardis, this is easy terrain; the team also surveyed the steep ground towards the theater, acropolis, and elsewhere in challenging conditions. We rise for an overview of the hill, and then dive to a view of the dense archaeological remains that excavation has uncovered in one small area, the central trench on this hill; similarly dense remains probably cover the entire hill and, indeed, most of this part of the site. Here we see remains from the Roman period (the mortared rubble walls), Hellenistic (unmortared fieldstone walls and most of the features built of white limestone blocks), Lydian (walls built of white limestone and dark schist), and, at the end, Medieval just beginning to be exposed in a new extension. It is easy to understand how geophysics is less successful here in this maze of intersecting walls and other features, than at sites with a less complex history. Nevertheless, such investigations offer valuable oversights into the general character of the archaeological remains in different parts of the ancient site.

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