Archaeology and artifacts of the Gallipoli peninsula

Abstract

Apart from a few years of illegal archaeological excavations in the late nineteenth century by the famed German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, and brief archaeological campaigns undertaken during and shortly after World War One by the French Expeditionary Forces, the Gallipoli peninsula was effectively off-limits to archaeologists and maintained as a Turkish military zone until 1979. Numerous references to the ancient past and topography of the peninsula can be found in the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Strabo, Xenophon, and others. These authors describe events that occurred on the peninsula during its Classical and earlier historical eras, but historians, philologists, and archaeologists have tended until quite recently to focus their archival research and conduct their excavations on the better-known sites of the opposite shore, such as Troy or Alexandria Troas. Prior to the French excavations at Elaious, Ottoman laws forbidding the removal of antiquities from the empire had been proposed as early as February 1869.