“In 1988 we finally obtained permission to drill into the site, and we obtained reasonably good quality core from four different holes.” (Baumgardner, 1999 email)
Between July 28 and August 7, 1988 team from Turkey and the US did drill at the Durupinar Noah’s ark boat formation site. However, the team only drilled four 3 ½ inch diameter holes of which only three reached any significant layers and depths. While Dr. Baumgardner wrote that they found nothing man-made or any petrified wood he also stated that his three core holes on this 515-foot large boat formation site were “severely limited in its ability to find buried archaeological structure, especially if it is sparsely distributed and has been significantly altered by decay and chemical weathering.” (Baumgardner, August 1988) To learn more about their core drilling please click here.
While Dr. Baumgardner, who is a geophysicist, in the end decided that this site was not Noah’s ark his Turkish colleague and partner in the 1987 geophysical survey expedition and their 1988 core drilling work, Dr. Salih Bayraktutan, still maintains that “We have a boat-shaped object at an elevation of 2,000 meters that did not occur naturally. We haven’t found anything that refutes the possibility of this being Noah’s Ark. We can see signs of specific structures in our scannings that are not naturally occurring.” (Bayraktutan, September 2002)
As the Wyatts have stated in their newsletter, “Taking 4 core specimens of 3 ½ inch diameters from a site 515 feet long does not provide a fair representation of material present. And even with this minute amount of specimen, evidence was found of an extremely high iron content, including limonite.” (Wyatt Archaeological Research Newsletter, July 1996)
To learn more about core drilling as a tool in archaeological sites please review this paper, Geoarchaeological Core Prospection as a Tool to Validate Archaeological Interpretation Based on Geophysical Data at the Roman Settlement of Auritz/Burguete and Aurizberri/Espinal (Navarre). (Geosciences, October 2017) “This paper analyses the validity of geoarchaeological core survey to check the archaeological interpretations based on geophysical results… Site delimitation and archaeological interpretations based on magnetic data could be improved or corrected. In this regard, the core survey proved to be a useful methodology as many anomalies could be checked within reasonable time and resources. However, further geophysical investigations through GPR revealed unexpected remains in areas where no archaeological deposits were identified through coring. Excavations showed poor conservation level in some of those areas, leading to thin archaeological deposits hard to identify at the cores. The sediment core survey, therefore, was proved to be inconclusive to delimit the archaeological site.”
Figure 3. (a) Location of the cores drilled in 2014 over the geological plan and areas of the magnetic survey (T: Terrace; C: Colluvium). The cores showing archaeological deposits are highlighted as positives, and the ones where no archaeological remains were identified as negatives. (b) Location of the cores drilled in Otegi area in 2016, over the magnetic response map.