After a one-year break caused by pandemic situation, the Armenian-Polish Archaeological Mission, Metsamor goes back into the field. The eighth season of archaeological excavations in Metsamor will begin soon, on August 16th, and is scheduled to September 16th. This year expedition has a total of 23 members (list below), including several ‘debutants’. Unfortunately, for various reasons, in this year we will not see some extremely important members of our expedition- Otto Bagi, Artavazd Zakyan, Elisabeth Bastien, Astghik Simonyan, Dan Socaciu, Deborah Gawlikowska and Menua Gevorgyan. However, we hope that despite their absence in this season, we will be able to meet them in the next, planned for spring 2022.
This year, APAMM members will, for the first time, live outside Taronik village, which has been our regular accommodation base since 2013. Due to courtesy of the director of the Sardarapat Ethnography Museum, Mr. Karen Pahlevanyan, the mission will be accomodated in the renovated „Scientist’s House” on the area of this extremely important museum institution, located near the city of Armavir.
The plans for this year’s mission, apart from the excavations themselves, include several very important, from a scientific point of view, research activities.
From the very first day, a team of geophysicists (Maks Mackiewicz, Maciej Ehlert) will set off to the field, trying to determine the location of architectural objects remains still underground in the settlement and the cemetery. They will be followed by a team of geoarchaeologists (Barbara Woronko, Bartosz Placak), who will search for changes in the geomorphology of the area, the Araxes riverbed and the main clay sources near the site itself.
On August 18th, the archaeological team will start work, which this year will be divided into two teams. The first one will be to explore the undiscovered part of a large building, which includes structures S5 and S6. As previous geophysical surveys have shown, the building extends far to the south and may consist of several unusually large, most likely representative rooms. In addition, the research conducted here in 2021 will allow to determine the date of construction of the entire structure.
The second team will facing the task of completing the exploration of House II and examining the remains laid below its foundations. The structure S18 adjacent to the building from the east also remains to be examined. The surveys conducted in the area of House II will be extremely important to trace the changes in the development of the entire settlement between the 9th and 8th centuries BC, which is one of the most important tasks facing the NSC research project.
At the end of the excavations, an isotope research project (Arkadiusz Sołtysiak, Hasmik Simonyan) will be carried out, aimed at establishing the origin of the deceased buried both in the Metsamor estate and the nearby cemetery. As in 2019, our palaeobotanist (Roman Hovsepyan) will also start work, looking for plant macroremains in samples collected during the season.
List of participants of the upcoming season:
Krzysztof Jakubiak, Aszot Piliposyan, Mateusz Iskra, Hasmik Simonyan, Kinga Bigoraj, Arkadiusz Sołtysiak, Barbara Woronko, Tigran Zakyan, Nerses Mamikonyan, Lusine Aleqsanyan, Roman Hovsepyan, Maksym Mackiewicz, Maciej Ehlert, Karolina Warecka, Olga Puszkarewicz, Joanna Dzikiewicz , Ewa Kwiatusińska, Patryk Okrajek, Maciej Sobczak, Jolanta Stawicka, Bartosz Placak, Emilia Sroka, Jakub Perkowski
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