Free Love's Obsession by Judy Powell Page B

hills and survey the plains spread out like a map below … The friendliness of the people was more marked now that we were known, and when you’re coming home dirty from the day’s wander it is a pleasure to anticipate a hot bath and to know that your old friend at the eating shop will have put aside some choice kebub (little bits of meat strung on a spit and roasted over an open fire) and a dish of yogurt, however late you may be. 43
    In fulfilment of his fellowship, Jim sent Alan Wace a report on the Prehistoric Sites in the Balekişir Region. The scholarship was Jim’s but the report is in Eleanor’s handwriting.
    At last Jim found a site that he wanted to excavate, near Babaköy in northwestern Turkey. It was, he claimed, where all the Yortan pots were coming from and he asked Wace if there was any way he could get extra funds to pay excavation costs. Fearing that the Wilkins money would not cover all his expenses, he planned joint excavations with Kurt Bittel. Wace advised Jim to apply for a Sladen scholarship, which he did, although in his application he failed to mention Bittel’s involvement in the project, or his determination to excavate with or without funding. 44
    While waiting to finalise plans, the Stewarts visited Troy where the archaeologist Carl Blegan invited them to stay for a fortnight. The Sladen money came through and after much to-ing and fro-ing Stewart and Bittel began excavations at Babaköy, although Bittel initially refused to acquiesce to what he considered unreasonable Turkish demands. Bittel would do the planning and Jim was happy to learn. Eleanor was the photographer. Work would last only a week and was rushed. On the first day they arrived at three in the afternoon and had begun digging an hour later. 45
    For only a little over three days Jim, Eleanor and Bittel excavated at different parts of the site but most of the tombs had already been damaged by ploughing or looting. One grave was a double burial. Today—in light of the scientific methods now common and the cultural sensitivities now recognised—it is distressing to read of the extraction of one skeleton: ‘the bones were riddled with fibre and nothing short of a cellulose spray outfit would have got them out; wax was useless and in the end we had to be content with a few long bones and the skull’. 46
    Jim and Eleanor’s photographic catalogue was proving useful. Babaköy did indeed produce Yortan pottery, the distinctive black-slipped and burnished jugs common to Turkish burials and now known to date to the middle of the second millennium BCE. In one grave Jim found a Yortan pot identical in shape and style to a pot he had seen at the Cyprus Museum. The Cyprus pot came from Tomb 39 at Vounous and if the Vounous pot was, as Jim believed, a Yortan import, then this connection could be the key to linking sites in Cyprus and Turkey. This find alone might clarify relative chronologies in the Near East. It might prove the missing link.
    After Babaköy Jim and Eleanor spent a further two months excavating at Kusura in Anatolia, with the pioneering female archaeologist Winifred Lamb. In 1936 Winfred Lamb was forty-two and an experienced field archaeologist. 47 As a member of the British School at Athens she had excavated at Mycenae, Sparta and in Macedonia and her experience as Honorary Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge extended her interests into later classical periods. Even so, she was a woman and her position at the museum was, and remained, unpaid. She wanted to investigate the connections between the northern Aegean, the Balkans and Anatolia and this led her to excavate the site of Thermi on the island of Lesbos between 1929 and 1933, and to visit Troy where she undertook a broad survey of the prehistoric mounds of the area surrounding the site. Now she was working at Kusura, where a provincial town had thrived on the route between Troy