Message #183829

[Vlad the Impaler]

The University Museum began new excavations at Gordion in the late 1980s. Investigation of the northwestern part of the citadel mound, carried out in cooperation with the Royal Ontario Museum, was the key to a new understanding of the Hellenistic period. First of all, we now know that the Galatian occupation lasted at least 100 years and was marked by two destructions or abandonments followed by a brief third occupation. Second, our soundings show that the entire top of the citadel mound was occupied in the third and second centuries B.C., confirming Livy's description of the place as a substantial town. Third, the arrival of the Celts at Gordion is marked by a change in the use of space within the settlement as well as in architectural forms and materials: above ordinary mud-brick houses, the Galatians constructed a monumental public building of cut-stone blocks that was surounded by a massive stone wall.