Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Donald Sanders, an archaeologist who compiled and published the life’s work of Theresa Goell, a 20th century archaeologist who broke gender and cultural barriers in her field in the quest for knowledge about Nemrud Dagi, an archaeological site in the remote mountainous regions of modern Turkey. Donald donated a portion of her archive to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, which we used to create our new online exhibit spotlight, Theresa B. Goell: Breaking Ground in Archaeology. I wanted to understand what it was like to compile another archaeologist’s life’s work, and how that informs Donald’s own practice in the field. Here he is. Donald Sanders, welcome to the show.
Donald Sanders 01:25
Thank you for having me.
Jennifer Berglund 01:30
You started out your career as an architect, but later became an archaeologist. Tell me about that journey?
Donald Sanders 01:39
Yes, I’ve gone through many different, slightly related career changes. My interest in archaeology actually came first, and that began probably in the fifth or sixth grade, as I recall, when ancient history was first taught in the schools, and I was first exposed to things like pyramids in Egypt. And that normally blows people away and it got my attention, for sure, and I said, “Yeah, I want to find old stuff like this, too.” My interest was piqued, but nothing else came of it during grade school, and during high school, when one was preparing for college, we were given a standard test called the Cooter Preference Test, which was supposed to tell you if you didn’t already know what you want it to be, or what kind of school you should best go to and what kind of curriculum you’d best apply for it. And after I took the test, it told me that I should be an architect, not an archaeologist, I don’t even think archaeology was even on the test anywhere. But that was good enough for me. I mean, I was always interested in architecture, and I could draw fairly well so I figured, “sure, why not.” So I went to school. I went to Case Western Reserve University and got a professional degree in architecture. My last year of taking courses at Western Reserve, I had been taking some ancient architecture courses; one needs to take courses to fill in besides architecture courses. So I had a professor that was interested to learn that I had some interest in archaeology, and he was teaching the ancient world at the time. And we got talking and got fairly friendly, and even though my grades weren’t spectacular, I guess he was sort of enamored by the fact that I could combine both architecture with an interest in archaeology. And he invited me, of all things, to go with him as his field architect on an excavation in ancient Corinth in Greece, specifically, the Temple Hill excavations, which is a sixth century temple, right in the center of ancient Corinth, and I had to think about this for maybe a second or two before I scrambled and said, “Well, of course, I’ve always wanted to do this. This is fantastic.” Within a month after graduation, I was whisking my way off to Greece to be plunked down in this very alien culture, very strange language, fulfilling what had been, unbeknownst to me, a long dream to combine both architecture and archaeology. I had a great time and worked with Professor Henry Robinson, who directed the excavations. It was actually a Case Western Reserve University excavation at the time, for over 10 years. At the same time, since excavations only happened in the summer, I began continuing my career as an architect, working in various architecture offices in Boston. And the office that I had worked on for several years, eventually told me, “Look, you got to make up your mind what you want to do. You’re either going to stay here and become an architect, or you going to go off and become an archaeologist. I can’t have you be on projects for me here in the office, and then suddenly take off during summers and leave me short handed.” Now the decision I said, “Okay, well, I guess I really do want to become an archaeologist.” So I continued working in ancient Corinth, but at the same time, I applied to graduate school to get a degree in archaeology to try to get at least some of the credentials necessary to be able to practice myself in the field.. And I applied to various schools, one of which being Harvard, but Harvard didn’t really have a specific archaeology program in the type of archaeology that I was interested in. So after a lot of discussions with the deans of various departments, I finally got accepted to Harvard in a joint program in the architecture school and the Department of Anthropology, Peabody Museum. And I went there for a year and learned lots of things about archaeology, and one of the things I learned was, I really didn’t want to do South American archaeology, which is primarily what they were teaching there. And although I applied again to get in the next year to continue my degree program, I was only there as sort of a test student to see if this joint architecture-archaeology thing worked out, and I was rejected, which was not a happy thing. But my association with Harvard did allow me to be invited to the Harvard University survey expedition to Saudi Arabia. So I spent four months in Saudi Arabia doing field survey where I could put into practice a lot of the more sophisticated architecture and surveying talents that I picked up over the years, both at Corinth and in architecture school. So that was very exciting not only to be able to travel there, but to again combined architecture and archaeology in one field session. So I then decided, well, okay, Harvard didn’t want me so I need to apply somewhere else. I did, and I eventually got accepted Columbia University, where I went through and finished my degree and I got my doctorate in a Aegean Bronze Age archaeology, and my dissertation was a combination of an analysis of an early Bronze Age site on Crete, but using a lot of the architectural analysis tools that I picked up not only in undergraduate school, but during my one year at Harvard. And I came up with what I thought was a pretty cool, new way of evaluating how you could study architecture in the ancient world and extract from it the behaviors of the people that actually live in those buildings. It goes far beyond the normal study of architecture, which often relegates it to just another artifact, and it’s collected and it’s drawn and it’s depicted just like a pot or a coin, without much thought to the actual people who live there, collected and used all the artifacts that were found. As I was finishing my dissertation, wondering, “Okay, now I have my degree, I can go off and become an archaeologist.” I was approached by a professor at New York University named Kenan Erim, who I had been substitute teaching for, and he had a composition for me. He asked me whether I wanted to take up a project to finish the publication of a site called Nemrud Dagi in Turkey. And this led me to a completely different project. The next 10 years were spent studying that site, which was originally excavated and was going to be published by Theresa Goell. Theresa Goell worked in Turkey for several years, and it was during her undergraduate work that one of her professors suggested one of her topics for her master’s thesis eventually should be this site in Turkey called Nemrud Dagi. It was a site that was discovered but say it was rediscovered by the West anyway It was always known to the Turks, but it was rediscovered for Western archaeologists in the late 19th century by a bunch of German surveying engineers. When they brought back tales to Germany about the site they discovered with these massive 30 foot high statues, everybody thought they were crazy. Eventually, a couple of archaeologists, German archaeologists, were sent to see whether this was in the least bit credible. And they came back with even more fantastic stories about this amazing site on the top of the highest mountain in the Eastern Taurus range in southeastern Turkey. It was eventually given to Theresa as a Master’s project to work on and she got interested in the project. No one had studied the project or the site fairly thoroughly before because it was strange in that it was not only situated halfway between the Seleucid and the Persian Empires on the East, and the Greek and Roman world on the West, but the sculptures were sort of odd looking, and the inscriptions were sort of odd. It wasn’t really classical enough to be studied by classicists, and it wasn’t really oriental enough to be studied by those who are interested in Near Eastern culture. So it was just sort of left. And Theresa thought, “Well, this is a way I can make a name for myself. I’ll just pick this up and work on it.” Problem was it’s way far away from anywhere that Westerners would normally go. The first field work that Theresa Goell undertook was in central Turkey, with Teddy Goldman who suggested that “Okay, if you’re interested in Nemrud Dagi, we’re close enough that I’ll give you some time off to go explore the site. So Theresa took off one day on a train, a very long journey to get to Nemrud Dagi. You have to go by train, and then you have to walk, and then you have to go by mule, and it took days to get to the top of this mountain. She decided as soon as she got there that “Yes, absolutely,” she wanted to excavate the site, and she needed first then to get a hold of the Turkish authorities and apply for a work permit to excavate the site, which she did, and she began excavation in the early 1950s. At the same time, unbeknownst to her, there was a German archaeologist, who was also exploring the region of Commagene, where Nimrud Dagi is located at the ancient settlement. And he was a German archaeologist excavating and discovering sites and the rest of the region of Commagene, and he came across several sites that were of equal iconographic and historical importance. He was also interested in Nemrud Dagi because he was basically first an epigrapher, and he was interested in the massive inscription at Nemrud Dagi. So he applied for permits to excavate there at the exact same time that Theresa did. Eventually, it became known that they were both interested in the same sites at the same time for almost the same reasons. And they made an arrangement that Theresa would direct the excavations at Nemrud Dagi and have this German epigrapher whose name was Friedrich Karl Dörner as her epigrapher, and converse, when he was excavating the site of Arsameia farther down the hill, he would hire Theresa to be his architect. She also had, like me, she also had an architecture background originally, and she practiced architecture too, before she became interested in archaeology. So the two of them began working together in the early 1950s, and as a side note, one of the interesting aspects of their collaboration was that in 1950s, it wasn’t that long after World War Two, and Dörner was a former Nazi officer, and Theresa Goell is Jewish, and despite what happened in World War Two, the two of them had to come to an arrangement to work amicably together, not only on the same site, but they had to do their research and scholarship together and live in close proximity to each other for many, many seasons. They get along very well, and it all worked out, strangely enough, very well for both them. Dörner had several publications of all of his work, but Theresa, for all kinds of reasons, never quite finished her reporting on Nemrud Dagi. One of the things that happened was that at the site of Nemrud Dagi, and let me digress for a moment and describe the site for you. The site of Nemrud Dagi is on the top of the anti tourist mountains. It is actually at the very peak of the Eastern Taurus Mountain, around which the Commagenean engineers at King Antiochus Epiphanes, the king of the time, they carved three terraces into the top of the mountain, and on each of these terraces they built gigantic over life sized, colossal statues of gods, King Antiochus himself was placed on the throne among the gods. He wasn’t too egotistical, if at all, but apparently, that kind of religious inclination was prevalent in the Hellenistic period at the time, we’re talking first century BC, BCE. Also on these terraces, besides these colossal sculptures, which are well over 30 feet high, are also carved stele with the entire genealogy of King Antiochus on his mother’s side and his father’s side, and according to him, trace back to Darius the Great on one side, and Alexander the Great on the other side, leaving him, a great king among his peers. One of the wonderful things about Nemrud Dagi is that the sequence of statues on the stele the that depict all the ancestors on his maternal and paternal sides are dressed very accurately in the costume of their period, which means that Antiochus had access to some amazing histories to get the details right, and on the back of each stele there’s an inscription telling you who the person is, so this provides us with an exact genealogy of both lines of his family, things that were, at the time, missing from our knowledge of the ancient world. There is also a Greek altar and a Persian altar at the site. There’s a Zoroastrian and Mithraic Fire Altar at the site, and on the back of the statues, the colossal statues, is the largest Greek ritual inscription, which basically tells you what you’re supposed to do when you come to the site. And all of Antiochus’ followers were supposed to, on the monthly anniversary — monthly now, not yearly, monthly anniversary of his birth — they were supposed to go up onto the mountain which is a long way up the mountains. We’re talking 7-8000 feet from their villages and celebrate on the mountain. And he didn’t say weather permitting, he said you got to be here. And so apparently, they did. And during the wintertime, it’s not unusual to get eight to 10 feet of snow on the mountain. So I don’t know whether the people really did what he wanted to do or not, it was said, and it’s sort of hinted in this inscription, that Antiochus was supposed to be buried at this site. So one of the reasons why Theresa didn’t quite finish her reporting of the site when she finished excavating it in the 50s was because they haven’t found the tomb. And at that time, now getting into the early 60s, there were new subsurface survey techniques that archaeology was using, electrical resistivity and magnetometer, and gravimetric tests were being done in order to probe beneath the surface to look to see if there were any cavities in ground that could be a burial chamber. She raised lots of money in order to hire all these teams to come to the site to continue working, and this went through into the 1970s to do this unusual kind of subsurface probing to find the tomb. Unfortunately, the mountain, it turns out, is mostly limestone mountain, and because of the leaching of water through limestone, it forms natural cavities all over, and if you go to the site today, along the slopes of the mountain, there are many caves naturally forming in there. The natives call them ice caves, because in the summertime, they’re still ice very deep into the cave. And if you fight your way past the bears that are hibernating there, you can grab some ice and bring it up and use some of the berries from the trees and crush it together and make sherbet. That’s where we get sorbet from, the mixture of berry juice, and ice crystals. That’s from the Turkish tradition. When they did the subsurface probing, they found lots of cavities, but they couldn’t tell whether these were natural or artificial, so they started excavating underneath the massive tumulus that was built around the top cone of the hill, but the mountain itself and the tunus kept falling in on itself and they couldn’t stabilize it enough to excavate. So that was completely inconclusive, so eventually, she had to stop, and now she was stuck with massive amount of not only traditional archaeological material, sculpture and coins and epigraphy and history and architecture, and the archaeology and the excavation to publish, she was now ladened with all of this scientific data that she had to absorb and work to a final publication as well. Her health began to fail, and she just wasn’t able to complete the work, and this now with stretching into the, into the 1980s. And eventually, Professor Erim came to me and asked upon my graduation with Columbia, whether I would be willing to pick up the task of seeing the publication through and collecting all of Theresa’s notes. After some hemming and hawing, because Hellenistic wasn’t really my period, having a publication thrown at you is not something you toss away lightly. So I grabbed it, and ran with it.
Jennifer Berglund 18:12
What was it like going through her archives, spending all that time combing through the documents, not just about the site, but about her life?
Donald Sanders 18:23
Once I accepted the offer to take on completing the publication of Nemrud Dagi, I had to of course become familiar with what the site was. Hellenistic not being my expertise, and not having worked in Turkey before that was new to me also. I had to begin by collecting all the information, and it turned out there were masses and masses of boxes and boxes. We’re talking dozens of boxes of information and dozens, if not hundreds of plans, and other kinds of documents. And Theresa was also a prolific letter writer, as I suppose a lot of people were at the time, seemed as though there was no other way to communicate. She would write dozens of letters a day to colleagues and friends about her work, but especially to all the colleagues that had helped her and after almost 20-25 years worth of work at this site, she had many, many colleagues around the world who provided expertise during her investigations, and she had to keep track of all of them in order for them to submit their final reports so that she could put it all together and synthesize it into her final publication. So she would write all the time. And she would keep carbon copies of all the letters that she mailed, which was good, because when I was given access to her files, I could read through her personal material, a lot of which was obviously not relevant to what I was doing but since she was talking about her work in Nemrud Dagi, there were a lot of pieces of her analysis of the site that she would mention in conversation that I could extract from her personal correspondence and allow me to fill in gaps that were not present in her professional correspondence or in your notes or in the material that she got from her colleagues. Eventually, through the longtime collaboration with Theresa’s brother Kermit Goell, I made many trips to upstate New York to collect the material on studying material and eventually took the material where I could study it more closely at piles of boxes and letters, all of which needed to be sorted through not only chronologically but also by subject matter, because I had to determine which one of her colleagues were still alive, which ones had addresses that I could track down, and then I needed to begin to correspond with everybody to let them know that after a 10 year or so lapse, the project was going to be viable again, and would they please, please come back and allow me to continue with their assistance. Most of them, as I recall, most of them did reply very politely, more gracious than others in their willingness to open up all their research data to an unknown little recent graduate student like me. But eventually things worked out, and after traveling to Europe a couple of times and meeting with some of them, and then getting their reports back again, I began to get a clearer picture of what the site was all about, what its importance was, and how I was going to collocate all of the different sets of expertise into a final publication. The one missing bit in all of this was that I hadn’t been to the site. Luckily, I arranged with Kermit Goell, Theresa’s brother, to take a trip to the site soon after I was given the project. And it was pretty amazing. Again, it took us a long time to get there. Although these days, there are now roads leading up to the site, actual paved roads leading up to the site, and there is a little tea house at the side and little teeny, tiny museum. When I was there, though, there was nothing. And when Theresa was there, there was less than nothing. And it was largely as a result of Theresa’s work and making the site available to the world and knowledgeable to the world, that it has become a very serious tourist attraction.
Jennifer Berglund 22:14
And now it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, right?
Donald Sanders 22:17
Yes. Yes, it is. And it draws hundreds, if not 1000s of tourists there every day, mainly, because the site is uniquely impressive. But also because, being the highest mountain, the sunrises and sunsets are totally amazing, especially with these giant sculptural heads in the foreground. When I was there, I was able to see seven mountain ranges different in the distance from Nemrud Dagi, being up that high. This is of course is after…
Jennifer Berglund 22:47
Amazing.
Donald Sanders 22:47
…after you catch your breath and get used to being up at 7,000 feet, which is not easy. And the wind is the wind constantly blows up there. It gets really annoying. Well, when when I was first there, as spectacular as it was, I decided as long as they were there, I should, I probably wouldn’t get back there again, although I did, but I should remeasure the entire site using my architecture and surveying background. And I should photograph the entire site again in as many details as I could. Just to make sure that I had all the information that would be necessary for me to complete the publication. It turned out as I was going through the backlog of Theresa’s materials, that there were many, many different plans of the site, not all of which agreed with one another. And we also came across about 70 or 80 rolls of film that had never been processed, and they were tightly rolled in spools. It took a long time to go through and find a photographer. Turned out to be Theresa’s nephew, who is a professional photographer, John Goell, he helped me. And we spent many months processing these things as slowly as possible, and retaining as much of the image as possible. 99% of them are black and white. Not all of them came out, but we have to do the best we could. So the combination of that film, the film that I took, and Theresa’s many, many drawings and the drawings made by her surveyors and her several architects that she had used over the years and the geophysical engineers that were there, they made their own plans and my plans, we got a fairly accurate depiction of what the site was like. And eventually 10 years later, after I was initially asked, Nemrud Dagi was finally published by Eisenbrauns Press, fairly substantial two-volume set, we were able, after much discussion, we had come to the agreement to publish just about everything, and not to leave everything out because this was the only chance that people would have to be able to have the access to this material. So there are many, many hundreds 2-300 photographs in the publication and many drawings of hers, many original drawings mine and 4-500 pages of text explaining the site, and it was spectacular. And since the publication has come out, it has spurred countless numbers of new investigations of the site, both through satellite mapping and subserving, again, and then at many attempts at trying to reconstruct the site, or at least stabilize the site because of the masses of tourists that have descended upon it. When I was visiting the site for the first time, in the mid 80s, it was a wide open site, and there was nobody overseeing it, and I could climb up on the top of the mountain. And I could actually climb up on the statues to get detailed photographs of everything. But eventually, the antiquities service in Turkey decided the site was too important, there is now permanent guards at the site, most of the site is roped off and there are guided walkways that the tourists are supposed to stay to in order to to visit the site, which is is great for protecting. The site is still going to suffer long term damage because of the weather. Extremes of heat and cold on the very friable nature of the limestone and sandstone at the site that is very slowly peeling off layers of the statutes that eventually will become a legend. For a very short time there, I was the world’s expert on Nemrud Dagi. It’s such a strange feeling to have. Since then, as I said, there’ve been many other people that have researched the site and had new insight into what the importance of the site was. But for the time, it was, it was both exciting and scary. When you do the publication of this complexity, of this size, you got to get it right, because there’s really not probably going to be a chance to do over again. So a lot of the interpretations, I had to find other experts to help me analyze some of the material that had been worked on since the 50s. And there was a decision made by myself and the publisher that we really didn’t have time nor was I the right person to bring Theresa’s scholarship up to date, and into the 1980s and 90s. In other words, there had been a lot of research done on the history of Commagene, on King Antiochus as a king and of the actual sculpture and iconography of Nemrud Dagi. That was not going to be my purview to bring all this together, what my task was was basically to publish Theresa’s work. There are places here and there throughout the publication where I add editors notes, if there is something very specific to add the publication. Nicely this was to be her work, not mine. That was a decision that was made, so I had to be careful in how I was phrasing the interpretations to keep as much of her language and her intent as possible.
Jennifer Berglund 27:35
Interestingly, you were actually able to meet Theresa Goell. Tell me about that experience, and what did it reveal to you that you couldn’t learn in her archive?
Donald Sanders 27:47
I had first met Theresa fairly soon after the project was brought to my attention. She was living in New York City at the time, and I was still in New York City having just finishing my graduation at Columbia University, so it was fairly easy to visit her. She was not in very good health, and she wasn’t receiving visitors regularly. But with the help of her brother, Kermit, it was explained to her what my role in the project was going to be, and she really couldn’t talk all that well but we had short bursts of conversation over several weeks, in which I explained to her who I was, and that I was here to learn as much as possible about her work on Nemrud Dagi that she would be able to communicate to me. The gist of our conversations were mainly about her experiences at the site, what she could remember. There wasn’t much technical information or historical specifics that she was able to give at the time, but it was a matter of just gaining her trust and eventually getting her acceptance to go ahead and finish what would be her work and a tribute to her life’s understanding the site.
Jennifer Berglund 28:59
Did you get any sense from her that she appreciated what you were doing? Was she concerned about what you were doing about doing it right?
Donald Sanders 29:07
That was sort of hard to determine at the time. The conversations were much more general nature than that. It was mainly just trying to get conversation going, getting her comfortable with me asking her questions about the site, and about extracting from her as many recollections as she could. There wasn’t much more detailed with that that I can get from her given her situation.
Jennifer Berglund 29:30
Subsequently in going through her archive and going through these 1000s of letters that she was writing to people while she was at the site, what did you learn about her as a person?
Donald Sanders 29:41
And most of what I learned about recent did come from her vast letter writing campaigns over 30-40 years, because she was such an interested writer and her letters were never short. There were always at least one typed script page, if not 2-3-4, or five, sometimes, in which she’d go into great detail about whatever minutiae of the site she was working on at the moment. But she was also very interested in family. Because she was a woman, at that time in archaeology, trying to make at a sight in Turkey, and because at the time she was going deaf, she had many strikes against her as an archaeologist trying to publish a study, and what was otherwise, a male dominant professional at the time. So she was very interested in maintaining her stature, so she had to go to conferences, she had to give talks, she had to travel and try to raise money, and she had to meet new colleagues and find experts and continue to get those experts with whom she had worked interested in the project to stay on long enough to see it through to what would become the final publication, in her understanding anyway. So there were many things that occupied her mind, besides trying to get the work done. And through all of the correspondence that she had, both professional and personal, I got to know a lot about her life, and the advantages and disadvantages that a Jewish woman who was single, trying to make it in archaeology at the time, had to go through. And some of the things were pretty amazing and still resonate today, after when I think back on what she went through. It was not unusual, for example, for her two pack together, four or 5000 pounds of equipment that had to be collocated in New York, and in Europe, and trapped by boat, and by train, to the base of Nemrud Dagi, and then on endless mule trains up and down the hill, to try to get the materials at the top of the hill because there was no base camp at the mountain, at the site where you could leave material. They had lived in tents that were backed up against the leeward side of the mountain so that they wouldn’t get blown off the top of the hill. So this was every year, and then at the end of the season, you had to dismantle everything and carry all these 1000s of pounds of equipment, food and clothing and tents and survey material, excavation tools, and typewriters and chairs and beds and everything up and down the mountain. She had to do this every year. She was also at the site in charge of a contingent of sometimes 100-150 workers who were working at the site. And she being a lone Jewish female with this German officer by her side, at the top of the mountain, she had to remain in control, and for a female to be in control of Kurds and Turkish workers, both of whom came from male dominated societies, and of course, Kirks, Kurds, and Turks did not get along with each other all that well, back then, and often still don’t today. She was in charge in maintaining order and discipline at the site, while still letting the team sort of blow off steam once in a while without killing each other. A lot of weapons at the site. She did this not only very well, but she did this at this time when she was almost completely deaf, which means she had to learn to lip read in Turkish and Kurdish and German to communicate with Dörner, and she had to do all this without letting on to the workers that she was going deaf because this, besides being a female, being a female and not being able to hear very well, would have instilled a lot of rumors and would not have left her with the type of control that she really want it. So she had to do all this without letting on that anything was wrong. And she did that for years and years and years. Among the 1000s of pounds of equipment that she brought to the site, she would also bring clothing and medicine for the families of all the workers that she had at the site. She became the Florence Nightingale of the area, and she was sort of revered for that. So the workers and the antiquity service officers at the time gave her some slack because of all the good she was doing for the families of all the workers in the area. So she was pretty amazing woman given the hardship she had to go through and all of those nuances of her life came to life through her letter writing.
Jennifer Berglund 34:17
So what happened to this tremendous archive after you finish working with it?
Donald Sanders 34:24
As the publication was coming to a close, and I still had an office that was full of boxes of correspondence and letters and notes and drawings, plus all of the drawings and letters that I had accumulated during the time that I had taken over the project. When the project was winding down, it was time to figure out “Okay, now what? What happens to this material?” When Theresa was getting her master’s degree she was attending Radcliffe College, so it seemed, as I was finishing that, it would make sense for her personal material to get bundled up and separated from the professional and given to Radcliffe. Many months of negotiations and discussions back and forth, and that was eventually accepted, and many boxes of her personal material went there. As I was finishing the publication, I was beginning my work as a digital archaeologist and my company learning sites, and I have become close friends with the then director of what was then the Semitic Museum at Harvard, now the Museum of the Ancient Near East, and we had talked about the side of Nemrud Dagi, and about Theresa, and since the personal material was going to Radcliffe, would it be okay, if her professional material went in the Semitic Museum? It makes sense in the fact that the Semitic Museum’s coverage was sort of the greater Near East, so sort of clued included that area of Turkey. And because the material was going to be at Radcliffe, it seemed reasonable to assume that if the Semitic Museum could find a corner in its attic, somewhere, they would take it. Unbeknownst to them, there was a lot more than they realized. Once once they said, okay, it was too late. So eventually, I boxed up all the professional material and all the drawings and trucked it over to the Semitic Museum, and they took it. And actually, it turns out that just a couple of years ago, I stumbled across another box, plus another series of drawings that have to be turned over to the museum, so I did and add it to the archive. So hopefully, eventually, it will be cataloged. I know that since I finished the publication, and the material went there, there have been other graduate students from around the world who have come there to research the material. It’s all made accessible. I coordinated and catalog as best I could. But I’m sure Harvard has its own system. So yeah, it’s all there. Anybody who’s interested, hop on over.
Jennifer Berglund 36:49
Well, I know that the curatorial staff has been going through it, and we have published an online exhibit on Theresa Goell. Adam Aja, the head curator, he has spent quite a bit of time going through the archive, and we’ve put together a very nice online exhibit, which all listeners out there should check it out to learn a little bit about this incredible woman’s life. How do you think Theresa Goell impacted her field?
Donald Sanders 37:18
I think that, aside from the professional impact that the publication and Nemrud Dagi eventually made on archaeology. The bigger picture would be to look at what she did for this area of Southeastern Turkey. When she first visited the site, there was no way to get up to the site other than taking these pack mules and winding a way around the mountain, and eventually making your way to the top. And now there are two roads that lead to the top of the mountain then there are hotels on the way up, and there’s a new museum and a tea shop up there. All that change and the dramatic influx of tourists and the benefit economically to the area, is all due to what Theresa originally did at the site. When she started working there, there was very little known about the history of the site and a history of the area. But because of her research and exposure of the site, we now know so much more about that area of Southeastern Turkey, which was completely neglected for hundreds of years, simply because it was a no man’s land between East and the Greek and Roman West. Luckily for King Antiochus, and Commagene at the time, they controlled the single easiest river crossing of the Euphrates River at this point, that ran through Commagene. So King Antiucus came, got pretty rich taxing all the goods that went across his territory, to flow from east to west, and he was able to build this amazing tomb sanctuary. I don’t really think it’s tomb. I think he’s just a sanctuary. Actually, he was killed in battle elsewhere, and he was buried there. So Teresa’s impact, ad how she left, what her legacy would be was not only did she open up this area of Turkey for tourism and economic benefit of the area, but she opened up a whole new area of archaeology that needed to take more seriously this kind of middle kingdom, middle area between East and West, very important for the sculpture, the types, and the inscription went back and forth, and the religious ideas that went back and forth. All of that had to flow through Commagene, and it was King Antiochus who brought it all together, and it was Theresa that made it apparent to the world.
Jennifer Berglund 39:31
How did she impact you personally, both as an archaeologist and as a person?
Donald Sanders 39:35
I think her impact on me had to do one with just understanding what the rigors of archaeology used to be like so different from the way archaeology was like when I went off to do my fieldwork, and the hardships that one had to go through and what it was like to lead an excavation, the time and all the coordination and time it takes to do that kind of thing. And I learned it really on a day to day basis, because I read her letters every day, and actually got to understand day by day what it took to bring it all together. And not only that, I think her impact vicariously through the publication of the book meant that because the book came out, now to publicize not only her work, but the importance of the site, more and more people became interested in the site. And more and more people then came to me with questions about the site, and they were after the publication came out, there were at least two documentaries that I’m aware of that dealt with Theresa and the excavation of the site. And there have been many, many publications of the site, I don’t think that would have happened, hadn’t really been able to coordinate all the material that Theresa had put together that have languished for a while, but finally was able to see the light of day and make people aware of this and the importance of the site, and the importance of Theresa’s work. I think is clear in the amount of follow up that has been done since the publication. I think the only way that it impacted me in my professional career was to be a little bit more tolerant of the way archaeology used to be. You have to evaluate the archaeologist and the results of their work in context of when they were actually doing the work and what was available and known at that the time. You can’t look at it, and judge it from today backwards. And I think that’s something that has stuck with me, because I was so ingrained in becoming Theresa’s alter ego at the time that I saw the work that she had done from her point of view, and realized that there was a lot more to archaeology than just going to the site and bringing all these things in and analyzing it. And using all the most sophisticated equipment, it doesn’t have to know when I went back and continued my fieldwork was a little bit more sensitive to what it goes through to to carry on a material like that. But since then I have transitioned into the digital realm. And I spend most of my time digging through pixels rather than digging through sand and dirt. So I come at it from a little bit different point of view now, but Theresa’s work does continue to filter through the projects that we do, because one of the first projects that I worked on when I started doing virtual reality archaeology was to work on Nemrud Dagi. And as before, all of the archives went to Harvard, I still had all the material and that kind of firsthand evidence, primary evidence, is the best thing to have when one is trying to recreate a site in the digital realm. Access to the most accurate and detailed primary sources makes for the most accurate and precise virtual worlds even though the project of Theresa was finished, a lot of what she did stayed with me well after the project was done.
Jennifer Berglund 42:56
Donald Sanders, thank you so much for being here. This has been great.
Donald Sanders 43:00
Well, you’re very welcome, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
Jennifer Berglund 43:06
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund and the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture. Special thanks to the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East and to Donald Sanders, for his wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.