Scholarly Publications - Archaeology

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11693/115645

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Open Access
Aegean and aegeanising geometric pottery at Kinet Höyük: new patterns of Greek pottery production, exchange and consumption in the Mediterranean
(Cambridge University Press, 2023-05-29) Gimatzidis, S.; Gates, Marie-Henriette; Lehmann, G.
This paper examines the Aegean and Aegeanising ceramic wares of Geometric type that were recovered in excavations at the Cilician seaport of Kinet HöyÜk. Its Geometric pottery assemblage, published here for the first time, is among the largest found so far in the eastern Mediterranean and provides the starting point for a new reconstruction of Greek pottery consumption patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. With this aim, we first present the formal and archaeometric characteristics of the Kinet repertoire, the nature of its archaeological contexts, and how it compares with Geometric ceramic assemblages elsewhere. The second part of our paper assesses this popular Aegean ceramic type's modes of production in order to define the conditions that sponsored the many dimensions of its distribution, exchange and consumption.
Open Access
Citizenship in Hittite Anatolia
(Taylor&Francis, 2023-01) Gerçek, İlgi
Embargo
Toward an understanding of the exchange in ancient scented oils through organic residue analysis of Bronze Age Near Eastern ceramic bottles by GC-MS
(John Wiley & Sons, 2023-08-01) Tarhan, İ.; Massa, Michele; Türkteki, M.; Türkteki, S.
This paper presents a gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) organic residue analysis (ORA) of samples extracted from five Early Bronze Age ceramic bottles excavated at the archaeological site of Küllüoba in Anatolia (modern Turkey), and the first attempt at directly analysing the content of this category of products. Our results show that various types of liquid have been contained in different bottles and identify the presence of dicarboxylic and oleic acids with a large amount of palmitic acid in most samples, suggesting that they may have mostly contained a plant-based oil. The presence of diterpenoids further shows the addition of ingredients such as conifer resin and other plant-derived products. Overall, the analytical results presented here indicate the exchange of scented oils in Anatolia already during the late third millennium BCE. The different organic residue profiles contained in different samples also suggest a range of different recipes for these products.
Open Access
Officials and administration in the hittite world
(The University of Chicago Press, 2023-10-01) Gerçek, İlgi N.
Open Access
The last man takes LSD: Foucault and the end of revolution
(John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, 2022-08-01) Bryson, Dennis
Open Access
British pattern 1907 bayonets marked to the royal air force: an archaeo-historical investigation
(Routledge, 2022-11-14) Bennett, Julian; Ballard, J.M.
A known total of 83 World War One period Pattern 1907 bayonets for the ‘Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield, Mark III’ have pommel markings indicating issue to the Royal Air Force, formed on 1st April 1918. They bear alpha-numeric serial markings best interpreted as stock-taking marks, suggesting a maximum total of 70,000 were allocated for use by that air force. The written sources indicate that from at least 1922 to 1937, bayonets and the rifles to go with them were a regular part of an aircraftman’s equipment. Neither these nor a search of unpublished documents in the National Archives and the British Library provide a possible explanation why these weapons would be issued to the Royal Air Force, suggesting an archaeo-historical approach was more appropriate. This article sets out our results and conclusions on the subject.
Open Access
Laura Nasrallah, Annemarie Luijendijk and Charalambos Bakırtzıs (eds), from roman to early Christian Cyprus
(Published by Cambridge University Press, 2022-01-28) Gülsevinç, F.; Zavagno, Luca
Open Access
Ways of being: Hittite Empire and its borderlands in late bronze age Anatolia and Northern Syria
(Suomen Itamainen Seura,Finnish Oriental Society (Societas Orientalis Fennica), 2021-12-30) Durusu-Tanrıöver, Muge
In this paper, I take identity as a characteristic of empire in its periphery, denoting the totality of: 1) the imperial strategies an empire pursues in different regions, 2) the index of empire in each region, and 3) local responses to imperialism. My case study is the Hittite Empire, which dominated parts of what is now modern Turkey and northern Syria between the seventeenth and twelfth centuries BCE, and its borderlands. To investigate the identities of the Hittite imperial system, I explore the totality of the second millennium BCE in two regions. First, I explore imperial dynamics and responses in the Ilgın Plain in inner southwestern Turkey through a study of the material collected by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project since 2010. Second, I explore the identity of the Hittite Empire in the city of Emar in northern Syria by a thorough study of the textual and archaeological material unearthed by the Emar Expedition. In both cases, I argue that the manifestations of the Hittite Empire were mainly conditioned by the pre-Hittite trajectories of these regions. The strategies that the administration chose to use in different borderlands sought to identify what was important locally, with the Hittite Empire integrating itself into networks that were already established as manifestations of power, instead of replacing them with new ones.
Open Access
Priesterkönigs-schmiedemeister? Zur (un)sichtbarkeit von metallhandwerkern im grabritus der anatolischen frühbronzezeit
(Slovak Academy of Sciences, Archaeological Institute, 2021) Zimmermann, Thomas
This article discusses the visibility of founders or metal craftsmen in the graves of Early Bronze Age Anatolia (ca. 3000–1950 BC). The examination of relevant burials from the 3rd millennium BC cemeteries in Central and Western Turkey did not produce any assemblages containing diagnostic items like crucibles, cushion stones or other casting equipment, which is noteworthy given the abundance of metalworking features from domestic Early Bronze Age contexts. ‘Showcase’ inventories from Troia or Alaca Höyük, although said to contain metallurgical items, in fact do not support this peculiar type of burial group, which at present seems not to occur in Anatolia.
Open Access
Master and apprentice some thoughts on Anatolian Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age metalwork and the many dimensions of communicating skills and expertise
(Trnavska Univerzita * Filozoficka Fakulta, 2021) Zimmermann, Thomas
This contribution first challenges the traditional view of a linear, gradually advancing, and unbroken development of metalwork in Anatolia, with the simple mechanical treatment of solid copper as an indispensable precursor for complex extractive metallurgy. The present evidence rather testifies to a “second coming” of metalwork in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, after metallurgical activities remained largely idle after their inception around 5.000 BC. In the second part, phenomena like the absence of founder’s burials in Bronze Age Anatolia are reviewed, to deliberate about the communication of skill and knowledge for smelting, casting and refining metal.
Open Access
Hacımusalar Höyük in the Early Bronze Age
(Archaeological Institute of America, 2021-10) Özgen, İlknur; Baughan, Elizabeth P.; Ünlü, Elif
Excavations at Hacımusalar Höyük in southwestern Turkey have uncovered thousands of years of occupation history, from the Early Bronze Age through the Late Byzantine era. This article offers a general survey of the Bronze Age occupation levels so far explored on the northern and western slopes of the mound, with particular focus on two well-preserved Early Bronze II destruction levels, closely superimposed. We present selected finds and architectural features from each stratigraphic level in sequence and discuss their significance for current theories of cultural interaction and social organization in West Anatolia in the Early Bronze Age. This new evidence indicates that Hacımusalar Höyük and the Elmalı plain were more connected with other parts of Anatolia than recent studies of Early Bronze Age cultural zones suggest but still maintained a distinctive regional character.
Open Access
The first casting mould for a ‘Syrian Bottle’ from Lipnik, Bulgaria
(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2021-08-25) Leschtakov, L.; Zimmermann, Thomas
The following article presents the first mould ever discovered for casting a so-called “Syrian Bottle”, a distinctive vessel type that originated in Mesopotamia around the mid 3rd millennium BC and soon after spread to Anatolia, the Aegean and Southeast Europe, as imports and local derivatives. A few examples were made from precious metals and lead, the most notable one being a golden globular bottle, part of “Priam’s” Treasure A” from Early Bronze Age Troy. The mould from Lipnik seems to have been intended for the production of small metal bottles of ‘Syrian’ shape, and supportive agents like a green sand core applied for the production of such a complex item. The mould, however, was obviously never used. A review of associated manufacturing details like pegholes, riser and vent show that although these fea-tures were particularly prominent in the 2nd millennium BC, moulds from earlier (Anatolian) contexts do possess such characteristics as well. This currently unique, locally produced example is therefore dated to the latest 3rd or ear-liest second millennium BC, coinciding with ever-growing interaction between distant cultural entities stretching from Mesopotamia to Southeast Europe and beyond, and allowing for the exchange of ideas, fashions and technol-ogies.
Open Access
A call for arms! supplying the sultan’s army, 1916-1918
(Routledge, 2021-03-05) Bennett, Julian
A common feature of Turkey’s principal military-focused museums and of many local ones also, are displays of military equipment used in the First World War and in Turkey’s War of Independence (1919–1923). In many cases these are rifles and bayonets supplied by Germany to the Ottoman Empire during two specific periods: from 1887 to 1903, when Germany supplied all the modern infantry weaponry used by the Ottoman army; and from 1916 to 1918, when Berlin answered the request from Constantinople for the latest models of their own small arms. This article looks into the circumstances behind that request and the German response, with a focus on the bayonets that were provided, as these are most often seen in places open to the public today. In addition, a brief account is provided on how these rifles and bayonets remained in service use, often in a modified form, until the 1950s.
Open Access
"Un engin de torture, une baïonnette à crochets; une arme blanche déshonorée": an historicalarchaeological evaluation of the Sawback bayonets of the Deutsches Heer
(Taylor&Francis, 2019) Bennett, Julian
The Imperial German Army (Deutsches Herr) was unique among the combatants in World War One (WW1) in issuing to a proportion of its soldiers a bayonet whose blade back was fashioned as a saw. A common belief developed quickly among the Allies that these sawback bayonets were weapons specifically intended to inflict a particularly vicious type of wound. After setting out the origins of this class of weapon and explaining their real purpose, the two main types of sawback bayonet available to the Deutsches Heer during WW1 are then concisely described. Its reputation as a weapon of especial barbarity is outlined, along with an overview of bayonet use in combat between the mid-nineteenth century and 1918, as evidenced by official sources, highlighting the lack of any specific contemporary references to the use of or the wounds caused by sawback bayonets. The article concludes by detailing the contemporary German sources relevant to its withdrawal from service use in 1917.
Open Access
Two roman soldiers in İstanbul: Praetorian Guardsmen or Centurions?
(Peeters Publishers, 2020) Bennett, Julian
A relief panel exhibited in the National Archaeology Museum, Istanbul, shows two Roman soldiers in their ‘field-service kit’. The relief belonged originally to a monument built in AD 108/109 near what is now the village of Adamclisi in Romania in connection with the conclusion of the Emperor Trajan’s Second Dacian War. The monument had been furnished with 54 figured panels or metopes, the 49 surviving examples all with scenes relating to the Roman army at the time of Trajan and of considerable importance in Roman military studies in particular and in the field of Roman provincial ‘classical’ art in general. The panel in Istanbul demands greater attention as it appears to be a rare depiction of either Praetorian Guardsmen or Centurions in their ‘field-service kit’.
Open Access
Ein Untergang im Morgenland? – Göbeklitepe als Fallstudie für die Vollendung und das Verlöschen einer späteiszeitlichen Jäger- und Sammlerkultur
(The Oswald Spengler Society, 2020) Zimmermann, Thomas
The following contribution attempts to reconcile aspects of Cultural Morphology as outlined by Oswald Spengler in his seminal Decline of the West and Man & Technics with archaeological observations dating to the transitional period from the Epipalaeolithic to the Early Holocene in the so-called Fertile Crescent (ca. 10.000 BC). The finds and features of Göbeklitepe and related sites of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) in Upper Mesopotamia are reevaluated, to allow a different reading of the emergence of monumental architecture as the cultural climax of a then declining hunter-and-gatherer tradition, and not the prelude for a new era shaped by animal husbandry and agriculture.
Open Access
Snakes in the plain! Contextualizing prehistoric near Eastern snake symbolism and early human behaviour
(Peeters Publishers, 2019) Zimmermann, Thomas
The article attempts an alternative and anthropological-based hypothesis to explain the abundance of snake motives in the Earliest Near Eastern Neolithic, contrasted with their relative scarcity in later times. The focus is mainly, but not exclusively, on the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) of Southeast Turkey, with sites like Göbekli Tepe and Körtik Tepe having produced a huge number of snake motives applied to a variety of materials and items. The predominance of the snake motive is then related to venomous serpents being a cardinal thread to hominids and humans throughout their evolutionary history, and particularly to early farmers, where snakes were a notorious hidden danger for semisedentary, crop-cultivating communities.
Open Access
Extreme geomagnetic field variability indicated by Eastern Mediterranean full-vector archaeomagnetic records
(Elsevier, 2020-02-01) Ertepinar, P.; Hammond, M. L.; Hill, M. J.; Biggin, A. J.; Langereis, C. G.; Herries, A. I. R.; Yener, K. A.; Akar, M.; Gates, Marie-Henriette; Harrison, T.; Greaves, A. M.; Frankel, D.; Webb, J. M.; Özgen, İlknur; Yazıcıoğlu, G. B.
The magnetic field of the Earth can exhibit considerable variations at short time scales, even as short as decades. The archaeomagnetic studies of Middle Eastern artefacts (mainly from Israel and Jordan) show evidence for an exceptionally high intensity period from 1050-700 BC which displays two distinct spikes over the Levant, the Levantine Iron Age Anomaly (LIAA). Its exact duration and geographical extent are still poorly known. Despite the wealth of ancient settlements, the extensive cultural heritage and a long history of trade and immigration, the archaeomagnetism of Turkey and Cyprus remains largely unexplored. This study presents a large data set of ancient directions and intensities from seven archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean covering a time span of ∼2000 yrs. The recorded directions from thirteen sets of samples are coherent with our earlier findings, yet show significantly larger swings than existing field models. In particular, we confirm the very large swing in inclination we found earlier, from 1910-1850 BC, that is also captured by the Greek PSV curve, and shallower by more than 10◦than predicted by existing field models. Consequently, these models require substantial revision in this region. We were able to determine the archaeointensity from five sets of mud-bricks, from the thirteen attempted, allowing us to provide the full field vector. Furthermore, we present thirty-one new archaeointensity results from potsherds and mud-bricks that considerably enhance existing data, especially when a set of strict selection criteria is applied. Fourteen sets of potsherds from a single site (Tell Atchana) provide the longest sequence recorded so far in Turkey, from 2100 to 1350 BC. We find exceptionally high intensities of 145 and 175 ZAm2around 700 BC, in well-dated mud-bricks and potsherds from two different locations (Tell Tayinat and Kilise Tepe), supporting extreme geomagnetic field variability in the region. Moreover, these two high intensities confirm the younger spike of the LIAA in Turkey.
Open Access
Pisidia Apolloniası'ndan Via Sebaste'ye ait yeni bir mil taşı
(Türkiye Bilimler Akademisi, 2015) Coşkun-Abuagla, Asuman
Makalede Kuzey Pisidya bölgesindeki Apollonia antik kentinin yakınlarında bulunan yeni bir mil taşı tanıtılmaktadır. Bu mil taşından Via Sebaste’nin kuzey bölümünün İmparator Elagabalus Dönemi’nde onarıldığı anlaşılmaktadır. Via Sebaste üzerinde 198 yılında da geniş kapsamlı yenileme faaliyetleri gerçekleşmiştir. Aynı güzergâhın yaklaşık yirmi yıl aralıkla tekrar onarılması, bu yolun söz konusu zaman diliminde yoğun bir biçimde kullanıldığını, yolun yirmi yıl gibi kısa bir sürede bozulması da bu yol hattının yoğun bir trafiğe maruz kaldığını kanıtlamaktadır. Bu yoğun trafik, Septimius Severus ve oğlu Caracalla’nın düzenlediği Parth Seferleri ile ilişkili olmalıdır. Başka belgeler yardımıyla Parth Seferleri sırasında ordu birimlerinin Küçük Asya’da çeşitli güzergâhlar kullandıkları ve bu güzergâhlar ara¬sında Via Sebaste’nin de bulunduğu anlaşılmaktadır.
Open Access
The annexation of Galatia reviewed
(Koç Üniversitesi Akdeniz Medeniyetleri Araştırma Merkezi, 2019) Bennett, Julian
This article reconsiders the accepted views on the annexation and ‘provincialisation’ of Galatia by expanding on the military-related factors involved. It is argued that the annexation helped provide Rome with the necessary resources, including manpower, to maintain Augustus’ ‘New Model’ Army as established between 30 and 25 BC, as well as providing land for the future discharge of legionary veterans. The achievements of the known governors of Galatia for 25 BC-AD 14 are reviewed also, noting how their senatorial status as pro-praetor or pro-consul had no bearing on the type of garrison they commanded. The process of establishing the Augustan coloniae ‘in Pisidia’ is then re-examined, as is the evidence for the character of Ancyra, Pessinus, and Tavium in the pre- and immediate post-annexation period. The data for the garrison of Augustan Galatia is then surveyed, concluding that the legiones V and VII took part in the annexation and probably remained there until AD 8, these legions being supported by auxiliary units that remained in the province after their departure. Finally, the evidence for the formation of the legio XXII Deiotariana is re-assessed, concluding it was indeed constituted under Augustus using the former Galatian Royal Army.