Karkemish. Report on the 2011 and 2012 excavations in area F

The Turco-Italian 2011 and 2012 investigations in the Outer Town at Karkemish,2 aimed at clarifying the evidence for the Iron Age city wall system (Marchetti 2013; Marchetti 2014a; Marchetti 2014b; Zaina in press), as well as for domestic buildings (House A), both partially excavated by the British expedition led by C.L. Woolley about a century before (1921: 118-119, fig. 36). During the 2011 topographic survey of Area F, the remains of a pithos, some glazed sherds and some stone “weights” were noted on the surface West of House A (Fig. 1, Pl. II: 1). This accidental discovery was followed by a brief investigation of the area that revealed two Neo-Assyrian cremation pot-burials (G.456a and G.456b), containing the remains of two individuals associated with a rich corpus of findings. Further excavations in the area carried out in 2012 brought to light a third pot-burial (G.461), dating to the Iron Age III too. This group of graves is likely to be part of a larger multi-period graveyard as suggested by recent geophysical survey (2015) and renewed excavations in the area (2016).3 In this paper, after an introductory paragraph on the general topography and morphology of the area, we provide a detailed report on the burials excavated in Area F at Karkemish between 2011 and 2012, in the framework of the Iron Age cremation ritual at contemporary sites in the Middle Euphrates Valley.