Turkey has always been a crossroads and therefore offers an ideal location to study interaction between individuals and human communities and societies through time. Interaction has always necessarily involved movement which in turn did not occur randomly in the landscape, but was instead focused on routes and roads that secured faster and easier connections. There is substantial evidence that exchange networks already existed in Anatolia at least since the Neolithic period, with goods travelling over long distances. From the second millennium BC onwards, textual evidence has improved understanding of travelling routes. The Roman long-distance road network has been a focus of research over decades, but local roads and pathways around individual sites are still mostly unknown. Byzantine roads have also received attention, whereas the Seljuk road and routes system is less well known. It is likely that the younger roads and routes are overlying older ones at least partially, but these palimpsests of older roads are hardly researched. In this volume, experts from different disciplines, using a variety of methods and approaches, aim to transcend the present fragmentation of knowledge and create a new level of understanding of connecting road and route systems in Anatolia throughout time, for the first time.

People of Anatolia: Past, Current and Future Research in the Biological Anthropology of Türkiye brings together, in one complete volume, some of the current research foci and trends of biological anthropology in Türkiye. The papers within this edited volume cover a multitude of topics, many of which complement and enhance each other, helping to demonstrate the strength and variety of research currently being performed in Türkiye by both domestic and foreign researchers. Furthermore, several of these papers examine large scale diachronic changes and highlight the importance of such holistic approaches and methodological considerations, and new trends in modern research by considering large scale patterns through time and space and the ‘bigger’ picture. For example, the application of multiple, more traditional macroscopic, biological anthropological analyses in conjunction with more modern techniques, such as biomolecular analyses.Biological anthropology in Türkiye has developed markedly since the days of primarily analysing skeletal and dental morphometrics of the skeleton and investigating race. This is particularly true since the 1990s when studies have examined skeletal remains from Anatolia within wider bioarchaeological contexts and research questions. Research agendas have accelerated particularly in the last decade with the introduction and application of new methodologies, including quantifiable scientific techniques which has increased the ability to not only tackle existing and earlier research questions with more specificity and in more depth, but also enables us to tackle a greater variety of research questions, as well as stimulating new ones.This volume demonstrates how complementary, as well as large-scale diachronic studies enhance our knowledge not only of changes in human behaviour and human-environment interactions through time, but also how these changes affected people at the individual, population, regional and pan-regional levels. One of the key messages from this edited volume, as a whole, is that multi-faceted and holistic approaches to exploring particular research agendas are both important and essential. While the individual papers in this volume may not necessarily always employ a multi-faceted or holistic approach, the combined reading of them does so. The types of data and information contained in the papers of this edited volume, therefore, will be of great interest and importance to the wider archaeological community in general. But particularly to Turkish students of archaeology, as well as Turkish/Türkiye-based and research focused archaeologists and specialists of biological anthropology and bioarchaeology and its sub-disciplines.

The period of Anatolian history between the death of the semilegendary king Midas of Gordion ca 700 BC and the advent of the Achaemenid Persian Empire ca 550 BC is dominated by certain narratives: the rise of the Mermnad Lydian Kingdom, from Gyges to Croesus; the demise of the Urartian Kingdom and ‘NeoHittite’type culture and polities; and the invasion of shadowy forces from the Steppe: Cimmerians, Scythians and Medes. The discoveries of Geoffrey and Francoise Summers’s project at the massive walled city on Kerkenes Dağı have changed the cultural history and texture of Anatolia during this time period, opening up insights into the spread of Phrygian culture and language and inviting further discussion of how the period is framed. This book honours their accomplishments by presenting papers addressing the dynamics and events of that period from various angles, and in various regions and places, as well as other interventions on Iron Age Anatolia, from dating of kings to rare and potentially influential medical techniques. The volume sheds light on and also advocates for further synthesis of the regional dynamics affecting the Mediterranean, Near East and Anatolia together, toward the production of revised, more nuanced narratives.

This volume discusses the main excavations at Neolithic Çatalhöyük East undertaken from 2009 to 2017. The site is well known because of its large size, elaborate symbolism and wall paintings, and long history of excavation. This volume covers the last period of excavation directed by Ian Hodder in the North and South Areas of the site. It also describes the work conducted in the GDN Area on the later phases of occupation.The main aim of these excavations was to understand the layout and social geography of the settlement (both houses and open areas) and to situate the elaborate art and symbolism within a secure architectural and depositional context. Excavation and conservation methods are described and the campaign of geophysical prospection is described. Considerable focus is placed on detailed dating using Bayesian modeling that alters significantly our understanding of the organization of the settlement. New light is thrown on the degree of contemporaneity of buildings and on the continuities and breaks in house occupation and in the site as a whole. A fuller understanding has also been reached of the variability of houses and burials and of how these variations relate to social differentiation. The descriptions of excavated units, features and buildings incorporates results from the analyses of animal bone, chipped stone, groundstone, shell, ceramics, phytoliths, micromorphology. The integration of different types of data and of different voices within the excavation team mimics the process of collaborative interpretation that took place during the excavation and post-excavation process.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations conducted by Mellaart revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as spectacular wall paintings and reliefs in the houses. This volume discusses general themes that have emerged in the analysis and interpretation of the results of excavations undertaken at Çatalhöyük between 2009 and 2017, although many authors also discuss data generated through the whole 25-year period of excavation by the Çatalhöyük Research Project since 1993.This volume scrutinizes Çatalhöyük as the by-product of the activities of a community residing in central Turkey 9,000 years ago, but also as the outcome of the interactions of a community of researchers with wide-ranging theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches. The volume commences with an overview of community engagement practices and of the ways different audiences have interacted with the site through the life of the project. It then considers the differences in approach of the Mellaart and recent excavations and reflects on different methodological perspectives that have been used at the site. It synthesizes the diverse array of environmental resources that would have been used in different times of the year. The ways in which the community at Çatalhöyük was held together, but also how community dynamics may have changed over time, are considered through the analysis of open areas, house architecture and contents, and the sequence of activities in houses. Modeling changes in practices over time shows that the effects of new introductions such as cooking pottery played out over many phases of occupation. The evidence for violence at the site is re-evaluated integrating the analysis of human remains and different forms of artifacts such as projectile points, clay balls and maceheads. The use of pigments on house surfaces, objects and human bodies and the social practices surrounding these practices are considered.The diversity of themes discussed in this volume captures the multifaceted nature of Çatalhöyük.

This newest volume in the Çatalhöyük Research Project Series continues the interpretation of the material obtained during excavation of the site from 2009 to 2017 under the direction of Professor Ian Hodder. Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old tell site in central Turkey, is of international importance due to its large size at an early date, its dense population and its long occupation. Its well-preserved buildings and rich art in the Neolithic East Mound give a unique insight into early village life, and the site allows study of many of the main questions dealing with the formation of settled villages/towns and the early intensification of agriculture. This volume, in 16 chapters by project specialists, focuses on the material artefacts recovered from the site, including a range of clay objects (ceramics, clay balls, tokens, figurines) and others made of stone, shell and textile. The analysis of these items, within a framework of intersecting and transformative “flows” of matter that are entangled with human aims and strategies, illuminates issues of procurement and exchange, house and community (including shifting cooking practices and the early management of cattle), and the organisation of production. Collectively, they reveal how change was generated across 1,100 years of occupation by the ‘productive potential’ of things.

This volume reports on the ways in which humans engaged in their material and biotic environments at Çatalhöyük, using a wide range of archaeological evidence. This volume also summarizes work on the skeletal remains recovered from the site, as well as analytical research on isotopes and aDNA.

This volume explores the relationship between archaeology and contemporary society, especially as it concerns local communities living day-to-day alongside archaeological heritage. The contributors come from a range of disciplines and offer inspiring views emerging from the marriage of archaeology with a number of other fields, such as economics, social anthropology, ethnography, public policy, oral history and tourism studies, to form the discipline of ‘public archaeology’. There is growing interest in investigating the meanings of archaeology assets and archaeological landscapes, and this volume targets these issues with case studies from Greece, Italy, Turkey and elsewhere. The book addresses both general readers and scholars with an interest in how archaeological assets affected by people’s understanding of landscape and identity. It also touches upon the roles played in these interactions by public policy, international conventions, market economies and theoretical frameworks of public archaeology.

Building on similarities and exploring differences in the way scholars undertake their research, this volume presents crossdisciplinary communication on the study of borders, frontiers and boundaries through time, with a focus on Turkey. Standing at the dividing/connecting line between Europe and Asia, Turkey emerges as a place carrying a rich history of multiple layers of borders that have been drawn, shifted or unmade from the remote past until today: from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers to the period of early states in the Bronze Age, from the poleis of classical antiquity to the period of the empires defined by the Roman expansion and Byzantine rule, from the imprints of the Ottoman state’s expanded frontiers to contemporary Turkey’s national borders. Amidst proliferating interdisciplinary collaborations for the study of borders between social anthropology, geography, political science and history, this book aims to contribute to a nascent but growing direction in border studies by including archaeology as a collocutor and using Turkey as a case study.

This volume contains the final publication of the archaeobotanical remains recovered from four sites at the village of Aşvan in eastern Turkey, which were excavated between 1968 and 1973 as part of the archaeological rescue project in the Keban Dam region. An extensive programme of archaeobotanical research involved detailed study of the modern flora, the observation and recording of pre-mechanised agricultural practices and large-scale recovery of ancient botanical samples by water sieving. The report traces the evolution of cultivation in the region from the Chalcolithic to the Medieval period, charting the dominance of emmer and hulled barley in the Chalcolithic period, the emergence of free-threshing wheats in the Early Bronze Age and the introduction of irrigated summer crops, especially millet, by the Hellenistic period. Detailed attention is also given to the assemblage of weed seeds as proxy evidence for environmental conditions and climate change from around 4000 BC to the present day.

Tille Höyük 3.1 presents the structures and stratigraphy of the important Iron Age sequence at Tille Höyuek, a mound at a crossing of the Euphrates in eastern Turkey. The site, which was excavated between 1979 and 1990 by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, revealed ten major structural levels of the Iron Age, spanning the period from the 11th century to the 6th-4th centuries BC, as well as earlier and later remains, and the wide exposure of architecture provides a sequence of intelligible and impressive building plans. After the initial discussion of the background and methodology of their excavation, the successive levels are carefully described and fully illustrated. The earliest Iron Age occupation, simple buildings among the ruins of the Late Bronze Age, was followed by a major settlement of the Middle Iron Age, when the Neo-Hittite kingdom of Kummuh was at its height. Most impressive architecturally are a large palatial building centred on a courtyard paved with a pebble mosaic, which was probably built after the Assyrian annexation of Kummuh in 708 BC and continued in use through the seventh, and the excellently preserved Level X with many distinctively Persian architectural features (built in the latter half of the 6th or the early 5th century and probably lasting for a substantial time).

Tille Höyük 3.2 is one of the few Iron Age sites to have been excavated on the River Euphrates between Malatya and Carchemish on the Turco-Syrian border, at a crossing point on the west bank of the Euphrates, an area now almost entirely inundated by a series of dam schemes. It is the only one with a near-complete Iron Age stratigraphic sequence to be published in detail to date. The site was dug between 1979 and 1990 by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara as part of the Turkish Lower Euphrates Rescue Project. The excavation revealed important architectural remains of the Early Iron Age, Neo-Hittite, Neo-Assyrian, and Achaemenid periods, spanning the eleventh to the fifth–fourth centuries BC. In this second (and final) volume of the report on the Iron Age levels, the pottery and objects are presented, together with chapters on seals and plant remains, along with a concluding discussion of the material covered in both Tille 3.1 and Tille 3.2. Lying on the margins of the Mesopotamian world, and with contacts with North Syria, North Mesopotamia, and the Levant, rather than with Anatolia or the Mediterranean, Tille provides vivid insights into the cultural history of the region during the Iron Age. Tille 3.2 covers the material culture of Iron Age Tille and aims to draw lessons from the experience of rescue excavation in the context of a major dam scheme in a previously unexplored area of North Mesopotamia (with important implications for the archaeology and chronology of the region), and discusses the significance of the site in its local and regional context.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume discusses general themes that have emerged in the analysis and interpretation of the results of excavations in 2000-2008. It synthesizes the results of research described in other volumes in the same series. The volume commences with accounts of the recent work on community collaboration at the site, and with discussions of the methods used at the site. It then synthesizes the work on landscape use and mobility, integrating the work of subsistence analysis and the analysis of human remains. The storage and sharing of food is a related topic. The ways in which houses were constructed, lived in and abandoned leads to a broad discussion of settlement and social organization at Çatalhöyük and of their change through time. For example, shifts in the themes that occur in paintings in houses change through time as part of a wider set of social, economic and ritual changes in the upper levels. The social uses of materials and technologies are explored and the roles of materials in personal adornment. Finally, the discussion of variation through place and time is recognized as dependent on scales of analysis and social process.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. Çatalhöyük Excavations presents the results of the excavations that took place at the site from 2000 to 2008 when the main aim was to understand the social geography of the settlement, its layout and social organization. Excavation, recording and sampling methodologies are discussed as well as dating, ‘levels’, and the grouping of buildings into social sectors. The excavations in three areas of the East Mound at Çatalhöyük are described: the South Area, the 4040 Area in the northern part of the site, and the IST Area excavated by a team from Istanbul University. The description of excavated units, features and buildings incorporates results from the analyses of animal bone, chipped stone, groundstone, shell, ceramics, phytoliths, micromorphology. The integration of such data within their context allows detailed accounts of the lives of the inhabitants of Çatalhöyük, their relationships and activities. The integration of different types of data in the excavation account mimics the process of collaborative interpretation that took place during the excavation and post-excavation process.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume reports on the results of excavations in 2000-2008 that have provided a wealth of new data on the ways in which humans became increasingly engaged in their material environment such that ‘things’ came to play an active force in their lives. A substantial and heavy involvement was with alluvial clays that surrounded the site. In the absence of large local stone, humans became increasingly involved in the extraction and manipulation of clay for a wide range of purposes – from bricks to ovens, pots and figurines. This heavy use of clays led to changes in the local environment that interacted with human activity, as indicated in the first section of the volume. In the second section, other examples of material technologies are considered all of which in various ways engage humans in specific dependencies and relationships. For example, large-scale studies of obsidian trade have drawn a complex picture of changing interactions between humans over time. The volume concludes with an integrated account of the uses of materials at Çatalhöyük based on the analysis of heavy residue samples from all contexts at the site.

The Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey has been world famous since the 1960s when excavations revealed the large size and dense occupation of the settlement, as well as the spectacular wall paintings and reliefs uncovered inside the houses. Since 1993 an international team of archaeologists, led by Ian Hodder, has been carrying out new excavations and research, in order to shed more light on the people who inhabited the site. The present volume reports on the results of excavations in 2000-2008 that have provided a wealth of new data on the ways in which the Çatalhöyük settlement and environment were dwelled in. A first section explores how houses, open areas and middens in the settlement were enmeshed in the daily lives of the inhabitants, integrating a wide range of different types of data at different scales. A second section examines subsistence practices of the site’s inhabitants and builds up a picture of how the overall landscape was exploited and lived within. A third section examines the evidence from the skeletons of those buried within the houses at Çatalhöyük in order to examine health, diet, lifestyle and activity within the settlement and across the landscape. This final section also reports on the burial practices and associations in order to build hypotheses about the social organization of those inhabiting the settlement. A complex picture emerges of a relatively decentralized society, large in size but small-scale in terms of organization, dwelling within a mosaic patchwork of environments. Through time, however, substantial changes occur in the ways in which humans and landscapes interact.