An excavation to understand ancient communities

The ancient city of Teos sits on the western coast of Türkiye, directly across the Aegean Sea from Athens. Today, it is rubble and ruins, but 2,000 years ago, it was a thriving center of Hellenistic and Roman art, culture, and trade. Few people have inhabited the area since the third century CE, and nothing was built atop the site, giving archaeologists like Mantha Zarmakoupi, the Williams Assistant Professor in Roman Architecture at Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences, an opportunity for discovery.

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Specifically, Zarmakoupi has focused on excavating an ancient city council building called the bouleuterion. “This is the best-preserved building in the city of Teos, and it seems to preserve for us the early history of Teos underneath it,” she says.

Peter Satterthwaite, a Ph.D. candidate, emphasizes the bouleuterion’s significance as the heart of democratic political decision-making in Teos. “This building is extremely important for understanding the ancient communities that were living here and their institutions,” he says.
The team pinpointed the timeline: the bouleuterion itself was built during the Hellenistic period, probably toward the end of the third century BCE. The portico was added in the first century CE, during the Roman period.

The work also uncovered at least two mosaics, spread across separate rooms dating back to the third century BCE. One depicted two fighting cupids, figures of Eros, the Greek god of love, whose imagery is related to Dionysos, the Greek god of wine and the patron deity of Teos, with a major temple in the city.

After the first excavation season of 2021, Zarmakoupi’s collaborator and the director of the Teos Archaeological Project, Musa Kadıoğlu, was walking around the site in October and noticed the architrave blocks—those that would’ve sat high on the building, but that were now randomly strewn from previous excavations—appeared to bear a 30-cm high monumental inscription that had been erased. Only in the oblique light of the winter months was the inscription more visible.

Figuring out what those faded letters spelled seemed nearly impossible, but the archaeologists realized each stone block had marks made by their original masons that indicated their position in the building. With the help of masons’ marks and advanced 3D modeling technology, Zarmakoupi and her team put the blocks in order so as to reconstruct the building’s façade and read the erased dedicatory inscription.

So far, Zarmakoupi has reconstructed all but a small portion. She says she is waiting to finish the excavation to assess the building’s development, which, in turn, will help reconstruct the inscription’s missing part. She will then publish it in its entirety. In the future, she hopes to home in on the date of the city council building even more precisely and confirm her theories about the significance of the inscription on its façade.

To read a longer version of this story, visit Omnia.