Salvage Project of the Construction Area of the Ilısu Dam II

543 pp, color figures, hb, in Turkish-English bilingual.

The Tigris River flows in between the Mardin Verge and mountain Cudi. This landscape was covered with oaks and mast forests for a hundred of years (Figure 1.1-1.2). The area is located at most rough land in Southeast Anatolia but it is situated in a basin. Its location in a basin makes the climate mild. Here, in the plains the streams and rivers get dry during summer, however, during spring they get flooded with the melted snow and rain; these also create springs here. The chains of similar plains create natural passages in between the Upper Khabur Basin and the Upper Tigris Basin.

This part of the UpperTigris region was a terra incognita regarding the archaeological data since the last decade. The region will be affected by the dam and hydro electrical power plant project.The region is surveyed in 2008, and several sites are being excavated since 2009 witn n the scope of the salvage project.The construction area of the llısu Dam covering an area of about 1600 ha is located at the village of llısu within the district Dargeçit of the province of Mardin, at Koçköprü and Koçyurdu villages of Gülçükonak in the province of Şırnak.The area has been intensively surveyed In 2008 and 65 sites have been detected (Ökse et al. 2009a). According to the ceramics gathered from these sites a continuous settlement is observed since with Pre-pottery Neolithic period till today.