After 70 years of excavation, ancient Sardis becomes a UNESCO World Heritage site

"It's really important that it has institutional continuity," said Benjamin Anderson, associate professor of history of art and visual studies in the College of Arts and Sciences. "Many of us know and have been mentored by colleagues of the previous generation of excavators. As a result, it's one of the few long-term archaeological projects in the region that has generated a critical mass of data."

For the past several years, Anderson has focused on documenting the walls and buildings of Sardis' acropolis, which became an important center during the Byzantine period after Roman rule.

"This is a city that shows up in lots of ancient historical sources," he said. "But now, just in the last 75 years or so, we have the possibility of telling that story, also, through what the project has found archaeologically."

This summer marked another milestone. Thanks to decades of excavation and the support of the local community, Sardis was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

"The opportunity to really start understanding a culture through the material remains is pretty unusual, and it requires that kind of long-term commitment," Anderson said. "That's also what's being celebrated by the World Heritage designation by UNESCO. This project has always been distinguished from the very beginning by a desire to communicate results and to make their work legible to tourists and to locals and all manner of different audiences."

Sardis Preserves Thousands of Years of History

Once the capital of the Iron Age kingdom of Lydia, Sardis occupied a strategic location between the Mediterranean and the Anatolian plateau. According to Annetta Alexandridis, associate professor of the history of art and classics in A&S, it served as "a place of cultural encounter between the East and West."

The Lydian era remains especially significant to archaeologists and historians. The Lydians are widely credited with inventing coinage, and their ruler, King Croesus, became legendary for his immense wealth. Alexander the Great later conquered Lydia, after which Sardis became part of the Roman Empire, followed by the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.

"Because it was not over built by a modern city -- it's only a little village -- Sardis gives you a really long history, from the Bronze Age, third millennium BCE, to basically today," Alexandridis said. "These layers are all there, and make it sometimes difficult to excavate, because they are not clearly stratified. They interfere with each other, but, in a way, it's an ongoing history, and that makes it so fascinating for us."

As associate director of the excavation, Alexandridis studies Roman funerary culture and is now leading a survey of Sardis' cemeteries, many of which have received far less attention than the nearby Bin Tepe cemetery, located about 10 kilometers north of the city. Bin Tepe contains some of the largest tumuli (burial mounds) ever recorded.

A Site That Shaped Archaeology

Sardis also occupies an important place in the history of American archaeology. The first modern excavation, led by the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis in the early 20th century, was "a really large-scale exploitation," Alexandridis said. Excavators uncovered the Temple of Artemis and the necropolis, but many artifacts were damaged, disappeared, or were taken to the United States through questionable means. Among them was a massive column that remains on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The project ended with the Greco-Turkish War in the early 1920s. Over the following decades, some artifacts gradually made their way back to Turkey.

"It's one of the first cases where we can see the whole discussion about restitution of antiquities that were illegally exported, until some were returned to Turkey," Alexandridis said. "It has all of these broader issues of how to deal with cultural heritage from a not only preservation or scholarly point of view, but also political and legal, and of the question of stewardship and responsibility for culture in the past."

The modern Harvard Cornell partnership began in 1958 under Harvard archaeologist George M. A. Hanfmann and Cornell architect Henry Detweiler from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, whose expertise centered on documenting historic buildings.

"If you went to Sardis in 1950 there were a few things kind of sticking up above ground, but there was nothing really to see, per se," Anderson said. "The architects were the first generation of Cornellians who were there, and the project really committed to taking what they'd excavated responsibly, supplementing it through newly manufactured pieces, and presenting a total experience of the structure, instead of just producing a drawing and putting it in a publication."

During the 1950s and 1960s, the team reconstructed a monumental bath gymnasium complex and the largest synagogue in the ancient world. Those restoration efforts became influential models for similar work at archaeological sites elsewhere.

Since then, excavations have uncovered mud brick city walls, the acropolis, a Persian period garbage pit, a gold refining workshop, an ancient shopping district, and, most recently, a sanctuary plaza that required 15 years of excavation.

Training the Next Generation of Archaeologists

Today, the project is based at the Harvard Art Museums and includes researchers from Turkish institutions as well as several American universities, including the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the University of California, Berkeley. Cornell primarily contributes graduate students, along with an increasing number of undergraduates, who spend 10 weeks each summer working at the site.

Students either catalog recovered artifacts, most of which are ceramics, or "broken pots," as Anderson described them, or supervise excavation trenches.

Because Sardis sits on an alluvial plain, some trenches extend as much as 12 meters underground.

"[They're] quite terrifying in their own right," Anderson said.

"Local workers, who are already trained, gradually remove the soil, and the students are there observing, documenting, taking notes, asking questions, determining when they need to stop and call in maybe the director or an associate director to take a look at what's coming up, when they should take a photograph, when they should bring in the architects to make a state drawing of a particular moment," Anderson said.

According to Anderson, Sardis is one of only three excavation projects worldwide that "most people who go on to a career in classical archaeology in the U.S. have been through."

More than half of the researchers involved today are Turkish experts and students, and local participation remains central to the project's success.

"A topic that regularly accompanies what we are doing is how are we doing it? How do we include local expertise?" Alexandridis said.

Today, women from the Sardis region work alongside men in excavation and restoration efforts.

A Local Connection to an Ancient City

Leyla Uğurer, now a doctoral student in history of art and archaeology, grew up near Sardis. She first studied English language and literature at Istanbul University before deciding to pursue classical archaeology.

"To learn archaeology, you have to work at the site as well," she said.

Beginning in 2022, she surveyed rock cut tombs dating from the Lydian through Roman periods around Sardis. She continued that work for three summers before supervising the excavation of a late Roman site this year.

Her experience at Sardis inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. at Cornell, where Alexandridis became her adviser. Both share an interest in funerary art, which provides insights into beliefs about beauty, the afterlife, and everyday life.

This was the city on "one of the most important trade roads in the ancient world," where the first coin was minted and Alexander the Great visited, Uğurer said. "You were raised there, so you have the same culture going on in you and around you. I remember looking at archaeologists when I was a child and admiring them. To be familiar with those archaeological works going on also helps you understand the archaeological importance more."

She believes UNESCO recognition will bring important benefits to the region.

"As a local, I can say it is very important," she said. "First of all, now it is known worldwide and because of UNESCO, there can maybe be more funding for the excavation, also people, more tourists and more research. People will know the area much better, and there will be more protection."

Protecting Sardis for the Future

Greater protection is badly needed. Sardis' landscape is vulnerable to natural erosion, while many tumuli have already been damaged by farming. Looting has also become a serious problem.

Alexandridis said treasure hunters now operate on an "industrial dimensions" scale, using explosives, bulldozers, and often weapons to target ancient burial mounds.

Even after nearly seven decades of continuous excavation, researchers say Sardis still has much more to reveal.

"This is why the long-term commitment is so important," Anderson said. "One season's work, you'll learn how to do the thing, but you're not necessarily going to find something that will be especially significant for the history of the site, until maybe 10 years later, you find something else a little bit further away, and the pieces start to add up."