During the first millennium BC, after the collapse of the Hittites, Egyptians, Mycenae and Knossos, the economic and political shape of the world changed dramatically. During this time, Anatolia emerged as a major nexus for regional exchange and political interaction. While individual Iron Age centers in Anatolia have drawn archaeological interest for more than 100 years, little attempt has been made to understand how they interacted at a regional scale. The rise of independent merchants and the development of new shipping technologies produced unprecedented expansion both westward into North Africa and Spain, and northward into the Black Sea and Europe.
Despite a broad knowledge of these major political changes, we have very few documents that provide us with any sense of the contemporary cultural transformations. Stories remain speculative. In Turkey, or Anatolia - a bridge connecting East and West - researchers have only the sketchiest sense of how economies changed during this period of increasingly rapid and distant interaction, yet this is a hotbed of political and economic development. The larger project proposal seeks to investigate this little known but critical region of economic transformation.
By investigating the economic relationships of the eastern Mediterranean, specifically from coastal to inland Anatolia, over the course of the 1st millennium BC, the investigators aim to more fully grasp the nature of the economic dynamics of the period and how they formed the basis for the subsequent expansion of the Greek, Roman, and Persian empires. Specifically an attempt is made to understand the exchange of elite ceramics across the region as a key proxy for measuring economic dynamics. Because the chemical signature of clays are locally unique, elemental analysis of trade ceramics it should be possible to differentiate trade wares from different places. By sampling trade ceramics from well-dated archaeological contexts one can establish a detailed sequence of economic change.
In this feasibility study for a larger project the researchers will establish the logistics of sampling ceramics from many different projects, gaining permissions for export and analysis, assessing the possibility of sampling not only from ongoing excavations but from museum collections of the period, and running preliminary elemental analyses to confirm the proposed analytical methodology (INAA). Over the coming year the investigators will work with site and museum personnel, collect, prepare and submit ceramic samples for analysis. Identifying ceramics that have been widely traded, as well as those more regionally exchanged, will allow an understanding of how the scale and organization of economic systems change during the 1st millennium BC.
While many archaeological projects include some measure of international collaboration, this work extends the collaboration to include researchers from Turkey, Europe, Japan, Australia, as well as within the US. This represents a new and highly ambitious level of research collaboration for the region. The size of the geochemical and ceramic database created by this project is also ambitious and will be a major resource for ongoing archaeological research in Turkey and adjacent regions. The full-scale project should also provide an ideal setting for graduate student training both in archaeology and archaeological science.
