The Excavations at Alalakh
(Tell Atchana)

  
The archeological site of Tell Atchana (ancient Alalakh) is located in the northeastern Mediterranean region of the Republic of Turkey in the state of Hatay. First surveyed in the 1930s by Robert Braidwood, it was subsequently excavated by the British archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley from 1936- 1939 and after a break during World War II from 1946-1949. K. Aslihan Yener returned to Alalakh in 2000 as part of the Amuq Valley Regional Project surveys which have been on-going since 1995. Sponsored by the Oriental Institute, she directed excavations at Alalakh from 2003 to 2004. In 2006 the yearly excavations at Alalakh became a project on behalf of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Mustafa Kemal University in Antakya.

Alalakh is located in the southern part of the Amuq Valley (Plain of Antioch), approximately where the Orontes river bends west towards the Mediterranean Sea. The site measures 750 x 325 meters (22 hectares) and rises nine meters above the present-day level of the plain.

The broad horizontal exposures at Alalakh, which functioned as the capital of a small regional state called Mukish, have provided evidence of a city and its material culture during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages (c. 2200-1300 BC). Both past and present excavations have yielded extraordinary architectural monuments, a wide variety of rare imported objects, and extensive royal archives written in Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hurrian, as well as inscribed materials in Hittite. The sequence of royal architecture, temples, houses and ramparts with impressive gate structures defines the architectural legacy of Alalakh. Over 550 tablets and fragments form an important contribution to our understanding of a functioning second millennium regional center. All these finds have shed light on the ancient culture, politics, and religion of the region.

Since the study of Alalakh is integral to a broader interdisciplinary investigation of the Amuq Valley and its environment, several intensive surface surveys were conducted in the crop fields surrounding the site. These and other remote sensing studies targeted the possibilities of off-site settlement, or a lower town, or the location of an earlier channel of the Orontes River. Related to this question of outer town settlement is the question of whether or not there was a lake or moat surrounding the site. Given the vicissitudes of life on the river and its floodplain, such as marshes, floods, and shifting river channel a continuing aim of the project will be to develop a broad overview of the environment of Alalakh including studies of economic subsistence, trade, and resource exploitation.