Abstract
More than two decades of archaeological research at the site of Sagalassos, in southwest Turkey, resulted in the study of the former urban settlement in all its features. Originally settled in late Classical/early Hellenistic times, possibly from the later fifth century BCE onwards, the city of Sagalassos and its surrounding territory saw empires come and go. The Plague of Justinian in the sixth century CE, which is considered to have caused the death of up to a third of the population in Anatolia, and an earthquake in the seventh century CE, which is attested to have devastated many monuments in the city, may have severely affected the contemporary Sagalassos community. Human occupation continued, however, and Byzantine Sagalassos was eventually abandoned around 1200 CE. In order to investigate whether these historical events resulted in demographic changes across time, we compared the mitochondrial DNA variation of two population samples from Sagalassos (Roman and Middle Byzantine) and a modern sample from the nearby town of Ağlasun. Our analyses revealed no genetic discontinuity across two millennia in the region and Bayesian coalescence-based simulations indicated that a major population decline in the area coincided with the final abandonment of Sagalassos, rather than with the Plague of Justinian or the mentioned earthquake.
Highlights
In the last three decades, palaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA, has proven invaluable to disentangle the biological and cultural processes in humanhistory
The time-depth provided by the analysis of genetic variation in past populations is key to circumventing some of the limitations of interpreting present-day genetic patterns alone
Authentic aDNA sequences were obtained for 22 Roman and two Early Byzantine individuals, which were pooled in one population sample addressed here as Roman
Summary
In the last three decades, palaeogenetics, the study of ancient DNA (aDNA), has proven invaluable to disentangle the biological and cultural processes in human (pre)history. The study of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has contributed to reveal past demographic scenarios previously undetected in ancient human communities. Within the Eurasian continent, most aDNA studies on human populations have addressed various levels of temporal and geographical resolution, from wide-scale prehistoric population dynamics [1,2] to smaller-scale demographic events in more recent historical times [3,4]. Located 7 km north of the town of Aglasun, in the Turkish province of Burdur (electronic supplementary material, figure S1), Sagalassos played a key role in the past of the wider region known as Pisidia, as almost 30 years of archaeological research have revealed [5]
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