Project description

This project is planned to be an archaeological, geomorphological, ethnographic and ethnohistorical field project in the Southern Basin of Beyşehir Lake in Central Turkey. The project aims to examine diachronic change in the environment and archaeological landscape in this little explored region of Anatolia. The area was elected for focused fieldwork as a result of two seasons of reconnaissance on Late Bronze (Hittite) and Early Iron age (Late Hittite/Phrygian) rock-cut monuments, sacred springs and caves, which constitute the special research focus for the project. The interdisciplinary fieldwork will be carried out in five consecutive seasons starting in summer 2009. Permit and grant applications are pending.

The specific research goals and activities for the opening season are summarized below:

• Geomorphological research, in order to understand the evolving land resource base (soil, water, vegetation, building materials) available from antiquity to modernity.

• Archaeological survey will explore the region through extensive survey methodologies, involving the identification and documentation of settlements and other archaeological features. Focused topographical and architectural surveys of selected sites with extant surface remains are also planned.

• Ethnography and ethnohistory of landscapes. Ethnographic fieldwork will address the use, perception and imagination of anthropogenic landscapes among the contemporary settlers and transhumant communities. Similar questions will be asked of archival/ethnohistorical sources for the Seljuk (medieval) and Ottoman (early modern) periods.

The integration of these areas of research will address the complexity of how landscapes are used, transformed and made meaningful through a constellation of human practices, while investigating the continuities and ruptures in the long-term history of places.

Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age landscapes of Anatolia

This project emerges from our interest in pursuing an an archaeology of place at the rock reliefs and spring sanctuaries of ancient Turkey. In the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages in Anatolia (ca 1600-800 BC), Hittites, Assyrians and post-Hittite regional states marked their landscapes with rock-carved monuments and sacred pool complexes. Such rupestral monuments and cultic establishments often feature monumental inscriptions, imperial pictorial imagery and sometimes architectural complexes. These sites have so far been studied solely from the point of view of historical geography, using art-historical methodologies and philological interests, and interpreted as imperial interventions into the countryside. In a field project projected to start in Summer 2009, we plan to investigate such sites in the context of their surrounding cultural landscape and settlement system. Our two seasons of preliminary reconnaissance trips in South Central Anatolia suggest that several of these sites are built on top of abundant springs, along narrow river gorges, at caved river sources or sink holes, therefore usually associated with some extraordinary karstic/fluvial geological formation. Scholars have correlated such sites with the so-called DINGIR.KASKAL.KUR (lit. “Divine Road of the Earth”) of Hittite and Hurrian texts, understood as powerful god-filled places where humans could interact with the underground world of dead ancestors. These sites were also presented as witnesses to treaty-signing events among different polities.

A case study of the Assyrian Source of the Tigris river (Tigris Tunnel) monuments, north of Diyarbakir, suggests that such sites were always already symbolically charged places, cultivated by local social practices, and were then appropriated by state spectacles and building activities. In this field project, we will focus on the concepts of the social event and cultural performance (ranging from everyday practices to state spectacles), and investigate the formation of places as dense loci of human practice from a phenomenological perspective. This cultural phenomenon will also be investigated through carrying out what I would like to call an “ethnography and ethnohistory of landscapes.”

Events

• Drawing on rocks, gathering by the water: archaeological fieldwork at rock reliefs, sacred springs and other places. Workshop/conference to be held at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, March 1st 2008.

See Group Members, Todo, and Meetings.

Bibliography

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