The Harvard-Cornell Exploration of Ancient Sardis, ongoing since 1958, represents one of the longest-running archaeological projects in the region, fostering institutional continuity that has built a critical mass of data across generations. Led by collaborations between Cornell and Harvard, with involvement from Turkish and other U.S. institutions like the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of California, Berkeley, the project has uncovered layers of history from the Bronze Age (third millennium BCE) through the Lydian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman periods. Sardis, capital of the Iron Age Lydian empire, was a key cultural crossroads between East and West, credited with inventing coinage under King Croesus, and later conquered by Alexander the Great.
Key archaeological discoveries include the monumental bath-gymnasium complex and the largest ancient synagogue, reconstructed in the 1950s and 1960s as pioneering models for site presentation. Other findings encompass city mud brick walls, the acropolis (a major Byzantine settlement), a Persian-period garbage pit, a gold refinement site, an ancient shopping center, and a sanctuary plaza that took 15 years to excavate. Recent work by Cornell’s Benjamin Anderson has focused on documenting the acropolis walls and structures, while associate professor Annetta Alexandridis, as associate director, studies Roman funerary culture and surveys all city cemeteries, building on the well-documented Bin Tepe tumuli—some of the largest burial mounds recorded. Doctoral student Leyla Uğurer, a local from the Sardis region, has surveyed rock-cut tombs from Lydian to Roman eras and supervised a late Roman excavation trench this year, emphasizing funerary art’s insights into aesthetics, afterlife beliefs, and daily life.
The project’s historical context includes early 20th-century excavations by the American Society for the Excavation of Sardis, which targeted the Temple of Artemis and necropolis but involved large-scale exploitation, damaging artifacts and leading to illegal exports, such as a column now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This has sparked ongoing discussions on restitution, with some items returned to Turkey, highlighting broader issues of cultural heritage stewardship, preservation, politics, and legality.
Ongoing work involves summer fieldwork for Cornell graduate and undergraduate students in archaeology and anthropology, who classify ceramics (mostly “broken pots”) in depots or supervise deep trenches up to 12 meters in alluvial silt shafts. Local Turkish workers, including a significant group of women, handle soil removal and restoration, integrating local expertise crucial to the project’s ethical approach. This summer, community efforts contributed to Sardis’s inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage site, celebrating the long-term commitment to accessible communication of results for tourists, locals, and scholars.
Implications of these discoveries include a deeper understanding of Sardis’s role on ancient trade roads, its economic innovations like coinage, and continuous cultural evolution without modern overbuilding, though challenges persist from poor stratification, environmental vulnerability, agricultural damage to tumuli, and industrial-scale looting involving dynamite and bulldozers. The UNESCO status promises enhanced funding, tourism, research, and protection. As Anderson notes, “This is why the long-term commitment is so important… the pieces start to add up,” enabling significant historical narratives through persistent, multidisciplinary excavation. Alexandridis adds that Sardis offers “a really long history… that makes it so fascinating,” while Uğurer highlights its global recognition and practical benefits for locals.
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