With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Lisa Kealhofer and her colleagues will conduct two seasons of archaeological and paleoevironmental research in the region surrounding the site of Gordian. This major site, located on the central Anatolian plateau, was originally occupied at ca. 2,300 BC and documents a succession of cultures from the Bronze Age to the Romans. The massive mound which dominates the surrounding plain has been the focus of archaeological investigation for decades and its cultural sequence is well known. A site of this type however can only be understood within a broader regional and environmental context since, in the absence of long distance transport of foodstuffs, it must rely on this broader area for sustenance. Very little is known either about settlement or agricultural practices and these issues provide the focus for Dr. Kealhofer's research. During the Early Iron Age (ca. 950-750 BC) Gordion formed part of a larger Hittite empire whose heartland lay further to the East. Gordion likely occupied a peripheral position. At the close of this period, iron first came into widespread use at Gordion and at approximately this time the empire itself collapsed. In the succeeding period the site lay at the heart of the Phrygian empire. Dr. Kealhofer will examine changes in agricultural land use and subsistence strategy across this time interval and attempt to relate political organization, technology and agricultural projection. She believes that with the advent of iron and its use in plows, previously untilled areas because accessible to cultivation and that increased productivity in peripheral Hittite areas such as Gordion led to greater regional independence and the ultimate collapse of the kingdom. To collect the necessary data Dr. Kealhofer and her colleagues must reconstruct past settlement pattern and she will do this through intensive regional survey. It is also necessary to map the extent of prehistoric field systems and this is extremely difficult to accomplish because many relevant land surfaces are either buried or eroded. Preliminary fieldwork has pinpointed promising areas and sediment cores will now be collected. Thus the nature of land use over time will be assessed. The sequence of land use changes will be tied to settlement organization changes on the basis of radiocarbon dates and recovered cultural material. These data will allow the reconstruction of agricultural patterns associated with both settlement pattern changes and with known changes in the political organization.
This research is important because it will shed new light on how complex societies both rise and decline. It will provide a model for examining human behavior in an environmental context over long time spans and methodology and data will be of interest to many archaeologists.
