Recent archaeological discoveries at Karkemish. Anatomy and trajectories of a capital city on the Middle Euphrates

Eight seasons of renewed archaeological excavations and conservation activities have taken place between 2011 and 2019 at Karkemish (modern Karkamış Höyük, Gaziantep). The Karkemish archaeological project revolves around an international cooperation framework, one which involves not only specialists from many fields, but also several Universities, Museums, public Authorities and private Bodies uniting their efforts towards shared goals and priorities, including the long-awaited opening of the site, laying within a military area, to public visit. This multidisciplinary and multi-partner perspective responds to a contemporary view in which integration (also intended as a continuous feedback between all involved participants) is the method chosen for facing the complexities and the challenges posed by an anthropological approach, both as far as the past and the present are concerned. What follows is a presentation of our main results obtained at the field, while we had necessarily to leave out of the present work the significant results which have been collected through a complete restudy program of the archives and finds from the British Museum excavations (1878-1881, 1911-1920), for which we have benefited from the cooperation with the Anatolian Civilizations Museum in Ankara, the Archaeological Museums in Istanbul and the British Museum in London (and all the colleagues therein), as well as with several other research centers