Under the supervision of Professor Peter Magee, Steven Karacic will study the Late Bronze Age IIA (c. 1400-1200 BCE) ceramics from the site of Tarsus-Gözlükule, a major settlement in the region of Cilicia, Turkey and a provincial center within the Hittite Empire. For several generations, empires have been the subject of scholarly investigations which privilege evidence, both material and historical, from the imperial capital. Such approaches provide limited insight into those peoples living under the imperial yoke, often assuming a passive role on the part of provincial actors in the establishment of imperialism. Tarsus-Gözlükule, as a provincial center, provides a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of empire on a politically disenfranchised population.
Since the archaeological record preserves only a fraction of a society's material culture, the study of ceramics is one important means of investigating ancient lifeways. Often the pottery from Tarsus-Gözlükule and other contemporary sites within the Hittite Empire as been interpreted as the product of a standardized ceramic industry linked to direct imperial control and divorced from any form of agency on the part of the provincial population. A preliminary macroscopic analysis of the pottery from Tarsus-Gözlükule suggests more complicated patterns of production and consumption. Through petrographic analysis, Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis, and firing tests, it will be possible to offer further insight into the production and consumption of ceramics within a province of the Hittite Empire. In this way, the dissertation will re-write the narrative for Cilicia in the later half of the second millennium, offer new insights into Hittite imperialism, and contribute to debates on empire within the discipline of Anthropology.
On a broader scale, this project will analyze material from an old excavation, contribute relevant data to ongoing research in the region, promote international collaboration, and convert dormant archaeological materials into pedagogical resources. The ceramics in this study were excavated in the 1930s, when many of these technologies were either unavailable or in their infancy. This re-analysis of previously excavated material and its subsequent dissemination in academic journals and conference papers is of fundamental importance to the discipline. The mineralogical and geochemical data generated by this project will be an asset to current excavations at Tarsus-Gözlükule as well as several other sites in the region, and the exchange of this data will promote international collaboration between US and Turkish researchers. Finally, the data and thin-sections produced for petrography will be incorporated into graduate and undergraduate courses at Bryn Mawr College and will thus contribute to the training of a new generation of archaeologists.
