Staple Economies and Storage in Post-Hittite Anatolia: Considerations in Light of New Data from Niğde-Kınık Höyük (Southern Cappadocia)

Abstract

AbstractHistorical narratives about post-Hittite polities traditionally concern their political, military, and ethnic aspects, with very little attention given to their economic dimensions. Thanks to the recent discovery of large-scale storage facilities at the site of Niğde-Kınık Höyük, in South-Central Anatolia, this study aims to partially fill this gap, providing some new insights into the political economy of Iron Age polities of Anatolia and northern Syria. This evidence, radiocarbon-dated to the tenth century BCE, will be contextualized within a broader geographic and chronological context. The combined analysis of the archaeological and epigraphic record allows us to hypothesize that a distinctive “Hittite” tradition of centralized accumulation and redistribution of agricultural products survived the end of the Late Bronze Age in the former southern and eastern peripheries of the empire. The survival of such economic system can reshape established paradigms concerning the modality and degree of continuity across the Late Bronze and Iron Age divide.