Musings on Early Farming Communities in Northwest Anatolia; and other Flights of Fancy

Malcolm Lillie,Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg,Ron Pinhasi,Chelsie Budd,Necmi Karul

doi:10.24916/iansa.2012.1.1

Malcolm Lillie, Songül Alpaslan-Roodenberg + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.24916/iansa.2012.1.1

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Abstract

Musings on Early Farming Communities in Northwest Anatolia; and other Flights of Fancy

Highlights

IntroductionÖzdoğan (2011, 419) notes that “even in the most intensively surveyed areas of western and northern Anatolia, material indicative of the presence of an Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic horizon, as is the case in Greece and southern Bulgaria, is restricted to the coastal areas, suggesting that the inner parts might be devoid of population”
This paper represents the first stage of a newly developing research agenda that is being embarked upon with colleagues working in northwestern Anatolia
The area discussed in the current paper (Figure 1) was chosen because there is, in general, something of a regional “gap” in our understanding of the transmission of agriculture from the Levant into southeastern Europe, due, in no small part, to the fact that research undertaken in northwestern Anatolia was not viewed as being “central” to an understanding of Neolithisation in Europe per se

Summary

Introduction

Özdoğan (2011, 419) notes that “even in the most intensively surveyed areas of western and northern Anatolia, material indicative of the presence of an Epipalaeolithic/Mesolithic horizon, as is the case in Greece and southern Bulgaria, is restricted to the coastal areas, suggesting that the inner parts might be devoid of population” Whilst this situation is perplexing, there are numerous aspects influencing the “visibility” of earlier groups, not least due to factors such as historical perceptions of the region, conceptual biases that have placed an emphasis on the search for the Neolithic and Neolithisation processes, historical issues of accessibility, regional/political and nationalistic biases, and even the fact that the Neolithisation process “means something different in different parts of the world and in different parts of Europe” (Tringham 2000, 23; Zvelebil, Lillie 2000). By using palaeoanthropology alongside stable isotope analysis of human and faunal skeletal remains, the current study aims to test whether it is possible to determine if the Neolithic population at one site, Aktopraklık, exploited a wide range of wild resources (e.g. freshwater and terrestrial resources), as were available at the local and regional level, or whether, as in adjacent regions (e.g. Papathanasiou 2003), the population at Aktopraklık was already focussing their subsistence activities on a limited range of domesticated plant and animal resources as might be anticipeted if they were incoming farmers in this region

The Study Site

The Regional Context

Stable Isotope Studies of Diet

Neolithic Chalcolithic

Findings

Discussion