Maritime hinterlands and interregional interaction at Late Antique Kekova Adası, Türkiye

Abstract

How do resource-poor island communities develop networks to ensure their supply of foodstuffs and basic commodities? The growth of the Late Antique (5th-7th century CE) town at Kekova Adası on the southern Turkish coast of Lycia offers an instructive case study. Underwater survey along the town’s harbor front yielded large quantities of amphoras, utilitarian and fine pottery, and ceramic building materials that testify to local consumption and transshipment activities on the island. The origins of these materials serve as proxy for the networks of exchange that underpinned life on Kekova Adası. Yet because many of the most common amphora and other pottery types were produced over wide areas of many hundreds of kilometers of coast in Late Antiquity, ceramic petrography is necessary to determine or more precisely define the origins of these materials and, in turn, the shape of the networks through which they moved. The results reveal that the inhabitants of Kekova Adası developed a hinterland for supply by sea that encompassed the coastal plain around Limyra some 40 km to the east as well as, seemingly, across the open sea to the southwest corner of Cyprus. While most of the bulk processed agricultural goods (particularly wine and oil) carried in these amphoras, and the ceramic building materials and other imported wares, derived from these two regions, this hinterland also intersected with larger networks of exchange that brought amphoras as well as fine and cooking wares from across the Levant, Cilicia, the east Aegean, and the northeast Peloponnese. This pattern articulates the integration and mutual interdependence of Kekova Adası’s local network with the particularly busy interregional route that supplied major urban centers and the state during this period. In the process, the case study highlights the necessity of ceramic petrography as a means of precisely reconstructing such networks.