The Princeton University Antioch Excavations of the 1930s
As the only great city of late Antiquity that was not overlain by a modern metropolis, Antioch provided what seemed like an ideal site for a major excavation of the type carried out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with a team of American or European scholars supervising a large corps of local diggers to uncover and recreate the great monuments of Antiquity. Antioch held a particular attraction to Princeton, as the Chair of its Art and Archaeology Department since 1924, Charles Rufus Morey, was a specialist in the art of Late Antiquity and attributed the transformation from classical style to that of the Middle Ages to ‘Orientalizing influences’, which he envisioned could best be perceived in Antioch, which lay on the border between the Mediterranean and the Asian worlds.
The political situation in the region of Antioch favored such an expedition, as the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War resulted in the site being included within the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, and the French Archaeological Service seized on the opportunity to extend cultural as well as political influence over the area by providing the excavation with a grant of a six year, renewable, permit that included the participation of the archaeologist Jean Lassus of the Musées Nationaux de France as one of the expedition’s leaders. The economic situation of the times was less welcoming, as the Stock Market crash of 1929 threatened the financing of the expedition, with the eventual result that three American museums were brought into the undertaking.
The physical condition of the site posed unforeseen challenges as well. In addition to its location on the shortest transit route from the Mediterranean to the headwaters of the Euphrates, Antioch owed its ancient prosperity to the plentiful supply of water coming down from the surrounding mountains, especially from natural springs in Daphne on Mount Silpius on its southern flank. From the earliest times through the Middle Ages, these waters were controlled with systems of dams and levees. After the fourteenth century, upkeep on the infrastructures that managed the waters was neglected, with the result that in the early modern period a layer of silt as deep as ten meters accrued over the classical and medieval levels. As no ancient monuments were visible as an indication to guide the selection of places to dig, the Princeton team had to rely on the information of ancient narrative sources as to the topography of the town. In the course of the eight years of excavation, they failed to locate any of the monumental temples or palaces described in such works, and had to contend with seeping groundwater in the parts of the site near the river as well as the recurrent flooding of the area. The lack of finds from Antioch itself worthy of shipping home to the constituent museums was in contrast to the situation discovered in hill-top Daphne, where numerous luxury villas of were near the surface and offered astoundingly beautiful mosaics to be exported. The attention of the excavators gradually shifted from Antioch itself to Daphne and to its seaport of Seleucia, whose remains were also rich and near the surface.
It was Antioch’s location on the crossroads between East and West that combined with the worsening world political situation of the late 1930s to bring an end to the expedition. Modern Antioch contained a population of diverse ethnic, religious and linguistic identities, and was part of a province that detached from the French Mandate of Syria in 1938 and joined the newly founded Turkish state the following year. With war looming, the leaders of the Princeton excavation hurriedly packed up the expedition house and distributed the finds. Part of the material remained in the local Antakya museum, many mosaics and sculptures were divided among the participating sponsors, and the archives of the excavation, comprising thousands of photos, maps, diaries and journals, were shipped back to Princeton, as were large quantities of minor objects, ceramics and coins. In recent years, Princeton University, working with an international team of scholars, has undertaken a systematic review and digitization of this material, and in spring of 2015 an undergraduate class was offered that used these resources to reconstruct the history of one specific sector of the site, 17-O.
Links
Research photographs and archival documents from the 1930s excavations
Search page for the Princeton University Art Museum
Search page for the Princeton University Numismatic Collection