SUNY Cortland News

    As the summer approaches, Sharon R. Steadman, an anthropologist at SUNY Cortland, will once again pack her bags and head for central Turkey, where she will spend nearly two months excavating the remains of a culture that dates back to 5200 B.C.
    This year, Steadman's work will be supported by a $10,000 grant from the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, an international research center affiliated with Harvard University. Along with a team of up to 10 archaeologists and graduate students, Steadman plans to continue excavating remains at the site, Cadir Hoyuk, which means tent mound, from the Byzantine era.
    "We will be able to provide a very good picture of what was going on in this part of Turkey in the
Byzantine period based on our excavation," said Steadman, the field director of the 13-year-old archaeological project. "Prior to our work, we knew nothing about the period in this part of Turkey."
    Besides winning several grants to help finance the excavations, Steadman was the recipient of a 2005 service award from the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). The award recognized her contributions as the editorial assistant to the journal, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, for the past 10 years and her work in organizing presentations on Anatolia, the Asian part of Turkey, at ASOR's annual meetings held at different locations around the country each year.
    "Sharon is just one of those people who always sees the cup as half full," said Jeffrey R. Zorn, a visiting associate professor of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University, who nominated Steadman for
the award. "She's just so enthusiastic that way that everybody appreciates her."
    Steadman, an associate professor of anthropology, said her excavation team has made several key discoveries at Cadir Hoyuk that have led to greater understanding of the people who lived there over a period of 6,300 years. Ronald Gorny, a research associate at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and director of the Cadir Hoyuk project, said he originally hired Steadman because of her expertise in prehistoric cultures.
    "She's brought a lot to the project, not the least of which is money," Gorny said. "I think the major contribution has just been her personality and her ability to get along with people and her ability to inspire younger students who are working with us and inspire them to do their best. She brings out the best in people."
     Steadman, coordinator of the International Studies Program at SUNY Cortland, said the major finding excavators have made at the site was determining that Cadir Hoyuk was a sophisticated settlement in the prehistoric, Hittite and Byzantine eras. Up until the team's work, researchers assumed that the region was "a backwater with a bunch of podunks living there and doing nothing," she said.
    In the prehistoric period, dating from 5200 to 3000 B.C., excavations showed that the settlement had large-scale architecture and that the site was enclosed by a wall, suggesting that the inhabitants felt they might be invaded. The archaeologists have found an open high place, facing the highest mountain at the site, which may have served as a ritual area. A collection of pots unearthed in a building in this section may have been used to make offerings of food to the deities, Steadman said.
    "It was a pretty happening place in the prehistoric period, which nobody would have ever guessed," Steadman said. "It's taken years for us to excavate enough to get a sense of the life."
    In the Hittite era, from about 1800 to 1200 B.C., when Turkey's first empire was established, the settlement served as either an administrative or religious center. The team has revealed monumental architecture dating to this period, including a gateway to the city and major public buildings, which indicates that the site was important to the Hittite rulers.
    With a $5,000 grant Dumbarton Oaks awarded last year, Steadman focused on excavating ruins from the Byzantine era, from 200 to 1100 A.D. What the excavations uncovered last summer were the remains
of a Byzantine fort, complete with crosses, which may have served as a military post.
    This summer, the team wants to determine why the settlement was abandoned in 1100 after a general decline in the quality of life. In the 6th century, the people inhabiting the site were wealthy and living in upscale houses, but five centuries later their fortunes had changed, Steadman said. Two theories may explain the collapse: outside attacks from Arab cultures or internal problems such as a deterioration of farming or trade.
    "Is it clearly a larger issue and they're just the inheritors of a weak Byzantine empire or is it that the people at Cadir Hoyuk are not doing very well," Steadman said. "That's what we're trying to get at. We think it's probably a little of both."
    During the summer, Steadman will also continue her ethnographic fieldwork in the nearby village of Penir Yemez, a community of 170 people where she and the other archaeologists live. The village is similar to Cadir Hoyuk and studying this community has helped Steadman in her research.
    This semester, Steadman has taken a sabbatical to work on her upcoming book, The Archaeology of Religion: Cultures and Their Beliefs in Worldwide Context. Steadman said she decided to write the book because she could not find a suitable text for her course, The Archaeology of Religion.
    Steadman, who lives in Lansing, N.Y., earned her bachelor's degree at the University of California at Santa Barbara and her master's and doctoral degrees at the University of California at Berkeley. She has been a faculty member at SUNY Cortland since 1998 and is the director of The Rozanne M. Brooks Museum, an ethnographic teaching museum on campus. She is married to SUNY Cortland Associate Professor of History Girish N. Bhat.