Ottoman Archaeology at Nadin-Gradina, Croatia, 2016 The Ottoman era remains an under-explored component of Mediterranean archaeology, despite its place as one of the great world empires. This era of history, however, is the key to linking prehistory to the modern landscape. The study of the Ottoman Empire and its various conquests from an archaeological perspective holds the potential to seamlessly unite the ancient and the modern, to form an elegant and comprehensible continuity of the human story, and in this case, as it pertains to the Mediterranean. In the eastern Adriatic region of Croatia, the archaeological record of the Nadina-Gradina site reflects a vast array of cultural identities over the past 3,000 years, from Liburnian Iron Age to Roman, to Medieval and Ottoman. Here, the Ottoman period links the ancient world to the modern, presenting an opportunity to investigate this long continuum of human experience. In the summer of 2016, the Nadin-Gradina archaeological project focused in part on this Ottoman component. In an effort to understand the extent to which the Ottoman Empire impacted people, land, and livelihood in this area, the project began to map and excavate structures from this era of occupation. Efforts focused on a monumental a fortress shrouded in trees and a smaller structure interpreted to have been a mosque. These structures were documented using high resolution photographs from a drone-mounted camera and processed using Agisoft Photoscan software to create accurate digital 3D models. When combined with 2015 findings, the results shed light on this latest occupational phase at Nadin-Gradina and provide a cost-effective and efficient manner to field document and map the archaeological record.

Faculty Mentor: Gregory Zaro