The Late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age (EBA) 1 are dynamic prehistoric eras, encapsulating crucial political, social and economic developments in western Anatolia and the adjacent regions. Although recent fieldwork and synthesis on this transition in western Turkey provide a general framework for this important transitional period, we still lack a holistic understanding of settlement types, subsistence patterns and socio-economic interaction zones. Discovery of the coastal site of Kababurun during surveys on the Karaburun Peninsula enhances understanding of the Late Chalcolithic–EBA 1 transition by providing data on settlement characteristics, material technologies and subsistence strategies. Kababurun is currently the only absolutely dated prehistoric site in the Karaburun Peninsula, offering a reliable chronological basis for comparisons in the region and beyond. In this article, we first introduce and then contextualise the Kababurun data within the eastern Aegean and western Anatolian research problems, then discuss how that data might contribute to a more refined understanding of Late Chalcolithic to EBA 1 communities. In particular, we argue that the site of Kababurun represents a form of community that is vitally important but poorly understood for this period: a small-scale rural settlement, connected to local networks but without a specialised function.

This paper examines the Aegean and Aegeanising ceramic wares of Geometric type that were recovered in excavations at the Cilician seaport of Kinet Höyük. Its Geometric pottery assemblage, published here for the first time, is among the largest found so far in the eastern Mediterranean and provides the starting point for a new reconstruction of Greek pottery consumption patterns in the eastern Mediterranean. With this aim, we first present the formal and archaeometric characteristics of the Kinet repertoire, the nature of its archaeological contexts, and how it compares with Geometric ceramic assemblages elsewhere. The second part of our paper assesses this popular Aegean ceramic type’s modes of production in order to define the conditions that sponsored the many dimensions of its distribution, exchange and consumption.*

Trajectories of social complexity following socio-political collapse have provided fertile ground for new theoretical and methodological perspectives in archaeology. Here we investigate ceramics from the site of Alişar Höyük, a settlement that was likely part of the Iron Age polity of Tabal. Best known from Assyrian texts, Tabal emerged in central Anatolia after the Late Bronze Age Hittite collapse, but its structure and operation remain enigmatic. Excavated in the 1920s and 1930s, a large sample of ceramics from Alişar has since been curated at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. Using multiple perspectives on this Middle Iron Age ceramic sample, we explore the political and economic structures at this site in terms of its interaction sphere. Our results suggest that if Alişar was part of Tabal, by the Middle Iron Age this polity was highly intra-regionally integrated, competitive and heterarchical.

Who were the Lelegians? Ancient Greek and Latin texts refer to the Lelegians as an indigenous people, locating them in southwestern Anatolia in a region known in historical times as Caria. Yet attempts to find evidence for the Lelegians ‘on the ground’ have met with questionable success. This paper has two aims. First, it provides an up-to-date picture of the archaeology of ancient Caria and shows that there is little indication of distinctly ‘Lelegian’ forms of material culture during the first millennium BCE. Second, it juxtaposes archaeological evidence with the development of the Lelegian ethnonym and suggests that the idea of a distinct Lelegian identity was retrospectively constructed by the Carians to fulfil the role of an imaginary ‘barbarian other’. This happened in the late Classical and early Hellenistic periods, a time of intensified Carian ethnogenesis, and was a process that responded to and made creative use of earlier Greek knowledge traditions. Finally, this paper argues that a later horizon of Lelegian imagining occurred in modern scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries. Who, then, were the Lelegians? This article proposes that they were an imaginary people, invented and reinvented over the centuries.

This article deals with the location of Mount Theches, the vantage point from which Xenophon’s Ten Thousand famously got their first sight of the sea after a long and arduous march across eastern Anatolia. It discusses what the written sources can and cannot tell us about this iconic spot, comments on the currently favoured identification (stressing its dependence on an assumption about the route the army followed to and from the vantage point), and presents three other places that can come into contention if different assumptions are made about the route. The aim is not to insist that one or other of these is the correct solution but rather to underline the point that, since we do not (and are never likely to) know how the Ten Thousand approached Theches, and since there are many points in the Pontic Mountains behind Trabzon from which the sea can be glimpsed in the far distance, the identity of Theches is a problem that does not admit of more than conjectural solution. This prompts broader reflections on the textual and the topographical, and the relationship between landscape and narrative.

This article explores the architectural benefactions of Gnaeus Vergilius Capito, a wealthy resident of Late Julio-Claudian Miletus, who held a number of positions in the Roman imperial administration prior to constructing the baths and theatre stage building in his home city. Through a detailed study of the archaeological and epigraphic evidence associated with Vergilius Capito, this article sheds light on when and why he built his public monuments and will demonstrate how members of the provincial elite like Capito, who had also been involved in local and wider imperial society, were representedthrough architecture. It will also show how culturally bilingual individuals could play a fundamental role in promoting Roman cultural influence in Greek provincial settings and will advocate a more individual-focussed approach when discussing the influence of Rome on its provinces. The article concludes that Capito’s Roman-Milesian citizenship enabled him to mediate between the world of the Greek polis and that of the Roman imperial system and uses the medium of architectural benefaction as a vehicle for driving cultural change in provincial settings.

The Roman mansio or way station and Byzantine bishopric of Parnassos in Cappadocia is chiefly known through inscriptions and bishops’ lists and identified with the small Turkish village of Parlasan/Değirmenyolu. It came as a surprise when a salvage excavation unearthed a large building with sumptuous floor mosaics beyond the outskirts of the village. Previous excavation reports misrepresented the building as a basilica church, when it was in fact an apsed hall and may be identified as the reception unit of an elite residence, as this article shows. A large central room had an elevated apse where the landlord would have sat. An animal mosaic in front of the apse is comparable to similar compositions in fourth-to-sixth-century urban palaces but avoids any reference to pagan mythology and employs stylistic features that are otherwise known from church floors. A mosaic inscription identifies the reception unit as belonging to the bishop and thus as part of the episcopal palace. This discovery is augmented by the find of a Late Roman sarcophagus and three Early Christian gravestones. Later, after the original palace was mostly destroyed, the building complex underwent a second, utilitarian phase that appears to date from the Invasion Period, when the Arabs raided central Anatolia from the seventh to ninth centuries.

Worn constantly on the chest, reliquary crosses were intimately implicated in the lives of medieval people. Previous studies of such crosses have tended to consider them as tools through which people achieved specific ends, either as prophylactics against disease or as signifiers of hierarchical status. An alternative and complementary interpretation would emphasise intimacy: the prolonged rapport of particular crosses with particular bodies. This paper assembles and publishes 14 reliquary crosses from Aphrodisias in Caria, presented with commentary in an appendix. The body of the article addresses the archaeological contexts in which these crosses were found and explores the funerary use of reliquary crosses across Middle Byzantine Asia Minor from this novel perspective.

This article discusses a subterranean building, situated north of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was investigated during a recent interdisciplinary survey conducted by Çiğdem Özkan Aygün. Although it is generally accepted that the edifice had more than one phase of use, the date of its original construction and utilisation has been problematic since the building is not mentioned in any written sources and was either not included in other archaeological excavations and surveys or not studied intensively. The aim of this paper is to present the underground building in detail and to propose a date for its construction based on the new survey data and on ancient written sources about the church of Hagia Sophia. Archaeological data from previous surveys are also taken into account. The subterranean building’s different phases of use are documented, and it is proposed that it was originally used as a reliquary, then later, after a number of alterations, became a cistern.