Temporary shelters for archaeological excavations. An application in Kinik Höyük site (Turkey)

Building temporary structures requires a change in the approach with respect to “ordinary” design. Some aspects (e.g. speed of construction, ease of disassembly) assume greater importance, others (e.g. durability) take second place. Temporary shelters for archaeological excavations also set further issues: the need to minimize construction time, in order to extend to the maximum the time available for excavation activities; the need to build in a complex plani-altimentric context and often in the absence of a definitive survey of the site; the impossibility of using usual construction machinery and to build “ordinary” foundation structures. Working in the Middle East requires you to interact with local workers who do not speak western languages and have a quite different technical culture; moreover, since excavations are often located in peripheral areas, the variety of materials available at affordable price and for prompt delivery is almost always limited. Together with general and methodological considerations, the paper illustrate the project of temporary shelters for the archaeological excavation at Kınık Höyük (South Cappadocia, Turkey). In relation to local technical and economic context, depending on the nature of the site, it was decided to build timber frame structures made of standardized locally-produced sawn beams, assembled by nailing. A fundamental requirement of the project was to ensure resistance to high winds that blow on the site from all directions: therefore the structure was braced using struts and X bracings, and suitable stabilizing masses have been set up to overcome the lightness of the structure.