After our work in Tehran we boarded a smaller propeller-driven plane and flew several hundred miles northwest to Tabriz, the provincial capital of East Azerbaijan. Our first stop was the U.S. consulate (a branch office of the embassy). The American consul in Tabriz was a young State Department staffer named Carlton Coon Jr. His father, Carlton Sr., an anthropologist who specialized in the races of modern man and of fossil man, had served on my doctoral committee at the University of Pennsylvania between 1956 and 1960. Not surprisingly, the young diplomat took a keen interest in this expedition from his dad’s university. As it later turned out, that interest may have saved my life.
After a couple of nights in Tabriz — more than two weeks after leaving Kansas — we finally hit the road for Hasanlu. Hasanlu was a hard day’s drive from Tabriz, so we took full advantage of being there to stock up on supplies. Bob Dyson’s equipment included a one-ton flatbed Ford truck with wood-stake sides — the sort of truck that could be seen all over Kansas hauling hay bales and livestock across the prairie. Bob crammed the back of the truck with food, tools, and Ted and me, and off we went in a cloud of dust. The roads weren’t paved but they were gravel, and they were pretty good. They’d been built by American troops during World War II to transport lend-lease equipment to Russia — convoys of trucks and tanks and other heavy supplies — and twenty years later, they were still good. Dusty, but good.
Much of the drive took us along the shores of Lake Urmia, which resembles Utah’s Great Salt Lake in both size and mineral content. Both are inland lakes that have no outlet, so as water evaporates, mineral deposits that have been carried down from the region’s mountains get left behind. As we threaded the shores of Lake Urmia in a cloud of dust, we saw local people wallowing in the mineral-rich mud flats, which ease the symptoms of rheumatism and other ailments.
One of the rivers that feeds Lake Urmia is the Solduz. By the time it reaches the lake, the Solduz has been tapped nearly dry by irrigation. Rainfall is rare in the summer; most of the annual precipitation comes in the form of winter snows, which accumulate on the higher surrounding mountains — some of them reaching 10,000 feet or more — and feed the rivers as they melt during the hot summers. The region’s hillsides are a stark grayish-brown, but the irrigated valleys are lush and fertile, thick with wheat, fruit, nuts, and rice. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, but if I ignored the mountains in the distance and focused on the rippling fields of wheat, I could almost forget that, for a moment at least. Then some unfamiliar sight would remind me I was thousands of miles (and many centuries) away from home: small children herding immense water buffalo; a towering haystack ambling along the road, completely enveloping the donkey that carried it.
The modern-day village of Hasanlu — and I use the term “modern” very loosely — was home to five or six thousand people, most of whom worked in the agricultural fields lining the Solduz Valley. Situated at an elevation of around 4,500 feet, the village would heat up into the nineties during the day but cool off considerably at night, as high desert locations do. By the time we bumped to a halt that evening, the sun was sinking, the heat was relenting, and Ted and I were caked with enough dust to render us nearly as dark-skinned as the villagers.
As best I could tell, Hasanlu had changed little since 800 B.C. The chief mode of transportation was walking, with donkey-riding a distant second. Buildings were made of mud bricks, baked in the sun; their roofs were constructed of saplings and branches laid across the top of the walls, then covered with several inches of packed dirt. In winter, it was important to sweep the snow off the roof, lest the weight cause the roof to collapse, or the spring thaw turn the dirt to mud. Inside the houses, the floors were dirt as well. The one exception to these ancient building codes was the village schoolhouse, which boasted a floor of concrete and walls of kiln-fired brick. The houses also tended to have haystacks on their roofs; if one catches fire, it’s easy for a whole village to go up in flames.
The town was strung out along the irrigation canal, called a “jube” (rhymes with “tube”). The jube was more than just a source of irrigation water; it was also where livestock came to drink, where women came to do laundry and wash dishes, and where people gathered to gossip or to pick up prostitutes, who were nicknamed “jube queens” for their habit of sitting alongside the jube and dangling their feet in the water while waiting for customers. The whole scene was like something from the days of Jesus or Mohammed, but then my eye caught a flash of familiar modern images: beneath a cloud of flies, the tables in the town’s open-air meat market were topped with flattened beer cans — Budweiser and Black Label empties. The surprise and incongruity of it made me smile.
One other note of modernity was a generator, which the American archaeologists had brought, and which ran every evening from six to ten. That one piece of technology changed the village culture dramatically. In the centuries B.G. (before generator), people went to bed at dark; in the A.G. era, people sat up at night for hours in front of the artificial breeze stirred by small electric fans, the village’s new status symbol.
I was glad we were spending the summer, rather than the winter, in Hasanlu. Winters are harsh, and the main source of heat is animal dung. It’s the children’s job to gather dung and mix it with straw into bricks or cakes (a word that seems terribly wrong paired with “dung”!). After they’ve been dried in the sun, the dung cakes are stacked into pyramids or cones, some of them the size of houses. In winter, these structures would be covered with snow; to get fuel, villagers would tunnel deeper and deeper into them, removing the cakes from the inside out. It would be important, I suppose, not to remove too many bricks from a key structural spot lest you cause the massive layer cake of dung to collapse on yourself. Even in the summer, dung cakes remain a primary fuel source; to heat a couple dozen buckets of water for my crew to shower, for instance — one bucket of soapy water and one of rinse water per person — required 2.5 dung cakes, at twenty-five cents per cake.
Because it was summer, the village school was vacant, so it had been converted into a dormitory for the visiting archaeologists and anthropologists, who numbered only ten or twelve altogether. Three of the group were women, and for the sake of propriety, they stayed in a separate wing of the school, separated from the men by a wall with a locked door. Ted and I bunked together in a classroom, which was quite small — maybe eight by ten feet. The room had only one tiny window, and our only source of light was a Coleman lantern, so it was very dark inside; early on, we whitewashed the walls to offset the gloom.
The archaeological site lay just outside the village. The citadel was roughly circular in shape, and about the size of the University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium, one of the largest stadiums in America. The fortress had been built atop a mound rising above the valley floor, to make it harder to attack. During World War II, Allied forces put artillery emplacements on the mound; I don’t know who they thought might attack here — maybe Rommel’s tank corps, which was sweeping across Africa and toward the Middle East. Twenty-eight centuries before Rommel’s panzers, though, the only armored vehicles were chariots, and in ancient Hasanlu, a chariot road angled up the slope from the valley to the main gate. The wall around the perimeter was about twenty feet high; defenders could be arrayed along the top of the wall, with archers also firing arrows from four large square towers spaced around its wall. Inside the walls, the palace complex was huge, with walls that had soared some seventy feet high. In previous summers, Bob’s crews had partially reconstructed the walls to stabilize them.