The Kushimoto Municipality was very kind to offer the use of a large building to the project in the end of the 2007 field campaign. This year we took possession immediately of what we decided to call the Ertugrul Center (nicknamed ERC). The building is an old primary school. It is a square building with a central courtyard. The corridor runs surrounding the courtyard with windows looking towards the inside. There are bathrooms and one large sports and conference room, the rest are all classrooms which are all accessible from the corridor and all have windows to the outside of the building. One of the classrooms had been converted into a kitchen by the local community that uses the building occasionally for community meetings.
For our purposes we are using just three of the rooms and the kitchen. One of the rooms is for all the diving gear and equipment and the other two are for laboratory and office use.
The lab has a sink and a large table for work on the artifacts and the old student lookers are used for our la supplies storage. The other office room is communicated with the lab by a small door and it can be used when necessary when working with the computers.
On the 17th of January Fatma and Tufan went with mr. Hamaguchi, the municipality representative, to take all the artifacts recovered in 2007 to the ERC to start the conservation treatment. Gunes and Fatma have been working on them cleaning the surfaces of concretion and initiation the desalination process.
Until now the excavation team has been cleaning and preparing the excavation area for mapping but no artifacts have been removed yet. When we start bringing up objects they will be going directly to the center where they will be registered, cataloged and photographed before the conservation starts.
