An Analysis of Stratification in Urban Archaeological Areas and Conservation Issues: A Case Study of Foça

Abstract

There are many settlements that have archaeological heritage from underground and aboveground besides remaining the contemporary life in the city center. These archaeological heritage consist of diff erent historical layers and stratifi cation is due to the continuous settlement along the historical process. Multilayered archaeological sites have been emerged in the city center because modern city is located in the same area with historical city center. Urban archaeology is a scientifi c way of determining existing and historical data for stratifi cation in a accurate way. Therefore, especially city centers are losing the traces of stratifi cation because of legal, administrative, social and economic reasons but there are still some settlements that refl ect the traces of diff erent layers. Foça is a multilayered city which was settled from the Prehistoric period to the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Genoese and Ottoman periods. It is required to be updated specifi c inventory system for the analysis of the stratifi cation in the city center. In this context, archaeological and architectural data belonging nine historical layers digitize and create layer maps. The multilayered identity areas were determined in the city by superposing the analysis sheets of diff erent layer maps and analysis sheets for each layer are generated. Analysis sheets have the location of excavation area, history of excavation and conservation works, photographs from today and past and colored drawings based on the period of the fi ndings. It is aimed that this study will be a template for the next works about inventory of cultural heritage.