The Middle Bronze Age—Southeastern Anatolia (original) (raw)
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Southern and Southeastern Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011
This article presents data on the Late Bronze Age of southern and southeastern Anatolia. Southern and southeastern Anatolia present three contrasting zones, differentiated by topography, elevation, climate, soils, and connectivity to neighboring regions. In the Late Bronze Age, as at other times, they offered varied options for human exploitation and settlement, and reflected different cultural and political inclinations. The Late Bronze Age cities, towns, and forts in southern and southeastern Anatolia endured various fortunes in the twelfth century BCE, but all experienced the eventual termination of this cultural, political, and economic phase. Most were destroyed and lay deserted for centuries, or their ruins were reoccupied by squatters and migrants, then abandoned.
(Eds. B. Helwing, A. Özfırat), Archäologische Mitteilungen aus İran und Turan 37, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Eurasien-Abteilung AuBenstelle Teheran, Berlin 2005: 139-152.
Inland western Anatolia and its Role during the Age of Interconnections
12th International Congress on the Archaeology of the Anci ent Near East, 2021
The second part of the western Anatolian Early Bronze Age is a period characterized by the establishment of organized trade through an extensive communication network, subsequently leading to an increase in cultural mobility through mutual interactions. The main reason for the organized trade-based relationship between two remote regions of Mesopotamia and western Anatolia seems to be that in the former no mines exist and there is a developed central state formation of Akkad. Copper, gold, and silver mines in western Anatolia were probably controlled by regional powers. This fact is the most important reason for the development of urbanization and the appearance of a new ruling class in western Anatolia. The development of extensive long-distance trade networks in western Anatolia started in the late EB II and reached its peak by the early EB III. Evidence of these exchange networks and their resulting relations mentions the diffusion of new technologies, such as the potter’s wheel, weight systems, and sealing practices, as well as the circulation of small prestige objects such as Syrian bottles, bone pigment containers, and semi-precious stones. Inland western Anatolia has an important role with its strategic location and also its access to the raw materials. The region has a long term, well stratified excavations with firm archaeological evidence such as Demircihüyük-Sarıket Cemetery, Küllüoba and Seyitömer that reflect these long distance relations. The aim of this paper is to expose the stratigraphy, cultural development of the region and re-analyse the archaeological evidence of this international trade in Inland western Anatolia during the age of interconnections. Substantially, the results of Küllüoba excavations in Eskişehir will be used as the basis to analyse this phase.
Akkadica, 2009
This article will attempt to examine the appearance of the local cultural dynamics and how the local societies in southeastern Anatolia were organized from the beginning of the fourth to the early third millennium BC. Until recently, it was believed that the development of the complex societies in southeastern Anatolia had evolved under the influence of the Syro-Mesopotamian cultures. New rescue excavations, however, have shown that local complex communities had emerged from the beginning of the fourth millennium BC in the region before the contact of the Mesopotamians. Morever, within even the Uruk period, a significant increase in socio-political and economic complexity resulting from contact with southern Mesopotamia is not seen in southeastern Anatolia. This period contained a number of local complex hierarchically structured socio-political formations that had grown in the first half of the 4 th millennium. Even if indigenous people had adapted many Urukinfluenced cultural features, their material culture remained on the whole fundamentally local. With the collapse of the network of Uruk, the local occupational continuity and the social systems did not totaly collapse in the region, rather they continued with the underlying local structure of previous periods. In this period, the region was characterized entirely local developments such as fortifications, urban behaviours, platforms, large centers, prestige items, settlement pattern shifts and distinct pottery styles zones, suggesting that the re-organization of the socio-political and economic structures of the communities in the region resulted from its own local trajectories.
(Eds. D. Peterson, L. Popova, A. T. Smith), Brill, Colloquia Pontica 13, Monograph Supplement of Ancient West & East, Leiden-Boston 2006: 160-171.