With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Christopher H. Roosevelt and Dr. Christina Luke will lead a three-year interdisciplinary research project exploring the cultural dynamics of social and political groups active in western Turkey during the Middle and Late Bronze Ages of the second millennium BCE. The project focuses on the Marmara Lake Basin of the middle Gediz River valley, a strategic gateway linking Aegean and central Anatolian spheres of interaction, to understand the local development and nature of centralized political authority in the context of dynamic and wider interaction spheres to east and west. Through integration of non-invasive surface survey, excavation, and sample and object analyses at a network of recently discovered citadels and other sites in the study area, the project investigates political alliances and economic relationships during a time in which Minoan and Mycenaean polities thrived in the Aegean and the Hittites of central Anatolia grew from a local kingdom to a vast territorial empire. The largest and most complex site of the local network was Kaymakçý, and it was likely both the local capital as well as that of an independent kingdom and later Hittite vassal known as the Seha River Land. The 8.6 ha citadel dates to the second millennium BCE, during which time parts of it were burned at least once, and after which time it appears to have been abandoned forever, leaving well-preserved Bronze Age remains on the surface.
These fundamental political and social processes are still at work in the Near East today and this archaeological project provides an excellent example to examine how they interact over an extended time period.
The proposed work will integrate geophysical and soil-chemistry surveys, excavation, ceramic and stone material studies, and botanical, faunal, and other subsistence and environmental sample analyses to address spatial organization, subsistence practices, and modes of material production for understanding the dynamics of social complexity in areas of overlapping interaction spheres. Furthermore, this research in the middle Gediz River valley will complement ongoing work elsewhere in Bronze Age Anatolia. While the valley has always been acknowledged as an important, connective corridor between the Aegean and central Anatolia, it has remained a major gap in archaeological and geo-political understandings of Minoan, Mycenaean, local Anatolian, and Hittite interactions in western Anatolia. The project plans to fill this gap with the first new excavation project in the region since the 1950s.
The broader impacts of the project include contributions to archaeological understandings of relationships between local communities, interregional interaction spheres, the spatial development of emergent political authorities, and the organizational characteristics of their subsistence management and material production activities. Additionally, the project will provide fieldwork opportunities and research topics for both American and foreign (especially Turkish) students. The educational impact of the project is of particular importance for contributing to archaeological heritage management in Turkey. With an American-Turkish team at both senior-researcher and student levels, and in cooperation with local representatives of the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the project will foment international collaboration in promoting global, interdisciplinary, scientific, and "best practice" anthropological approaches to the rich field that is the archaeology of Anatolia.
