Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2013
The ancient settlement of Sos Höyük, situated east of Erzurum, is providing a significant stratigraphic sequence of human occupation from the Late Chalcolithic to the Medieval period. This sequence includes the transition from the end of the Bronze Age into the first centuries of the Iron Age, a period which is surrounded by difficult but intriguing historical questions. At the mound of Sos Höyük evidence for this transition is starting to emerge from a relatively small operation on the northern slope, midway down the mound, in trenches M15 and L16.
The stratigraphic record at Sos Höyük together with a large range of radiocarbon readings taken from samples collected over four seasons of excavation indicate that the site was occupied throughout the late fourth/third millennium BC and intermittently in the second millennium. The earliest centuries of the second millennium BC are best defined by storage pits, wattle and daub dwellings and burials that conform generally to a tradition initially documented by Kuftin in his excavations of the Trialeti kurgan burials near Tbilisi, Georgia (Kuftin 1941; Miron, Orthmann 1995: 79–94).