Hattusha is on UNESCO’s World Heritage and Memory of the World lists.
Archaeological excavations at the ancient city of Hattusha in the Boğazkale district of Çorum have entered their 120th year, with 55 scientists and students from five countries working across a range of disciplines to shed light on the site’s 8,000-year history.
Hattusha, which preserves the cultural heritage of the Hatti and Hittite civilizations and contains traces dating back to the sixth millennium B.C., is included on UNESCO’s World Heritage and Memory of the World lists.
Located about 80 kilometers southwest of Çorum, the ancient city covers a settlement area of 2 square kilometers surrounded by 7 kilometers of fortifications. Scientific excavations have been carried out at the site since 1906.
The excavations, conducted by the German Archaeological Institute as part of the Culture and Tourism Ministry’s Heritage for the Future project, are uncovering remains from the Chalcolithic, pre-Hittite, Hittite, Iron Age, Galatian, Byzantine and Roman periods.
The excavations have been led by Professor Andreas Schachner since 2006. This year’s team includes specialists in archaeology, geology, geomorphology, architecture, philology and archaeozoology from Türkiye, Germany, Italy, Hungary and the United States.
Scientific excavations at Hattusha began under the Ottoman Imperial Museum in 1906. Although work was carried out for only four years until 1931, the German Archaeological Institute has continued excavations since then.
Schachner said specialists and students from different countries and disciplines work at Hattusha each season, with the project also serving as a training ground for young researchers. The team includes experts in archaeology, anthropology, geology, geomorphology, architecture, philology and the study of animal bones. Chemical, physical and other scientific analyses also play an important role, he said.
“It is a big puzzle. We are putting the pieces together here. We extract the raw data here, and many people work together to interpret it,” Schachner said.
He said Hattusha’s importance stems from its more than 400 years as the Hittite capital and its exceptionally long settlement history.
“From around 5500 B.C. to the present, we can comparatively illuminate the process in a region where settled life and early agriculture emerged,” he said.
Although the Hittite period is the main focus of the research, Hattusha is a multi-layered site containing remains from the pre-Hittite, Hittite, Iron Age, Galatian, Byzantine, Roman and Chalcolithic periods.
Researchers are seeking to reconstruct the region’s cultural history as a whole by comparing the ecosystem in which people lived, the materials and tools they produced and their ways of life across different periods, Schachner said.
Scientific excavations are being conducted at five separate locations at Hattusha this year.
“We aim to add new pieces to the mosaic we have and to better understand and consolidate the historical process,” Schachner said.
