Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771
ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM
Monday, January 31, 2011 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium
Brian Rose
"Excavating the City of Midas: Recent Fieldwork at Gordion in Central Turkey"
ABSTRACT -- This lecture presents an overview of recent research at Gordion, an archaeological site in central Turkey that is excavated under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The site is frequently remembered as the location of an intricate knot cut by Alexander the Great, or as the royal capital ruled by Midas, who reportedly had a golden touch; but in antiquity it served as the center of the Phrygian kingdom that ruled much of Asia Minor during the early first millennium B.C. Gordion is located near Ankara, at the intersection of the great empires of the east (Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites) and the west (Greeks, Romans); consequently, it occupied a strategic position on nearly all trade routes that linked the Mediterranean with the Near East. Excavations have yielded the tomb of Midas’ father (ca. 740 B.C.), which contains the earliest known intact wooden building in the world. Remote sensing (radar/magnetometry), some of which has been carried out by Goddard scientists, has produced the fortification system of the city and new information about its graveyards.
SPEAKER -- C. Brian Rose is James B. Pritchard Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Department of Classical Studies, Curator-in-Charge of the Mediterranean Section of the Penn Museum, and Deputy Director of the Penn Museum. He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1978, and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1987. Since 1988 he has been Head of Post-Bronze Age excavations at Troy, in northwestern Turkey, and English language editor of Studia Troica, the annual journal of the Troy excavations. He is co-director of the Gordion Excavation Project in central Turkey, where the University of Pennsylvania has been conducting fieldwork since the 1950's. Between 1994 and 2000 he was an Academic Trustee of the Archaeological Institute of America, then First Vice-President (2002-2006), and now President. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In 1994 he received the Max Planck Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, awarded to him and his collaborator, Manfred Korfmann of the University of Tübingen.