Theresa Goell

Theresa Bathsheba Goell (July 17, 1901 – December 18, 1985) was an American archaeologist, best known for directing excavations at Nemrud Dagh in south-eastern Turkey.

She returned to the Middle East after the Second World War, and in 1947 visited Nemrud Dagh for the first time; excavations there would become her life's work.

[9] Goell's work in Palestine also included contemporary architecture, and she was involved in the design of more than 200 buildings in cities such as Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

[9] In 1938 she enrolled at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York University, studying for a master's degree with Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann as her advisor.

[10] After the war, Goell travelled to Tarsus in southern Turkey, having been invited by Hetty Goldman; she spent the next few months working on the excavations there.

[12] She continued to work on the excavations at Tarsus until 1953, and due to Goldman's illness, ended up supervising the dig and overseeing the writing up of the results.

[4] In 1951, Goell returned to Nemrud Dagh, and began to arrange for an expedition there, hoping to be able to find and excavate the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene.

[14][3] In 1952, she began to raise funds and organise a team for an expedition;[15] the American Philosophical Society agreed to sponsor the dig, and the Bollingen Foundation made a grant of $2,000.

[3] In July 1960, Goell delivered a paper on the excavations at Nemrud Dagh to the Congress for Orientalists in Moscow,[20] and the following year, a survey of her work was published in the National Geographic.

Goell returned to Nemrud Dagh in 1963 and began two years of geophysical probing of the site, hoping to find the tomb of Antiochus I of Commagene; these attempts were unsuccessful.

[24] In 1968, though William Albright encouraged Goell to publish the first volume of the Nemrud Dagh report, she did not, feeling that the contributions from Dörner and John Young (who was working on the sculpture from the site) were incomplete.

[26] In February 1970, Goell was told that ASOR had set a one-year time limit for completing the Nemrud Dagh publication.

There, she prepared a report on the excavations at Samosata for the National Geographical Society, and planned new expeditions to Nemrud Dagh.