The textiles examined were from building-level VI provisionally dated as c. 6000 B.C. They were black, stiff and brittle, apparently owing to carbonization, and comprised some found in 1962 and others found in 1963. No attempt will be made to describe the structure of the cloth except to say that no weave was evident in the 1962 specimens; one series of yarns lay parallel, with no other yarns woven through them. In places other parallel yarns were fused at an angle across (but not interwoven with) the first ones. It was as if either the warp or weft had decayed, but there were no waves in the remaining yarns to indicate where the decayed yarns had been. This was probably the material described by Helbaek as resembling fishnet without knots. The yarns were less than 0·5 mm. in width, yet despite this fineness most were clearly two-ply. The specimens found in 1963 comprised one that had apparently been like the above but had broken into many short, straight pieces of yarn. There were also two pieces of cloth clearly woven, in apparently plain weave, from even finer yarns that nevertheless appeared to be two-ply. One piece of cloth had a selvedge.

Red Lustrous Wheelmade ware is one of the most recognisable classes of pottery from the Late Bronze Age of the east Mediterranean. Yet both its production source and the nature of its contents and use remain a source of some debate. These questions are tackled here through an intensive programme of scientific analysis involving 95 samples of Red Lustrous Wheelmade ware and related wares from seven sites in Turkey, Cyprus and Egypt. Petrography and instrumental neutron activation analysis are combined in the study of the ceramic fabrics, with a view to specifying the source of this ware; while gas chromatography and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry are used to analyse absorbed and visible residues in and on the sherd samples, in the hope of shedding light on vessel contents and possible use. The results of the fabric analysis show the ware to be extremely homogeneous, indicative of a single source: northern Cyprus is at present the most likely candidate, although further analysis, particularly of clay samples from the region in question, would certainly be desirable. The residue analysis suggests that Red Lustrous Wheelmade ware might have been used to carry some kind of plant oils, possibly perfumed, and that in some instances the vessel interior was coated with beeswax as a sealant.

The striking wall paintings uncovered in the excavations at Çatalhöyük have fascinated archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike, and many interpretations of their content and meaning have been proposed. This article re-evaluates the claim that one of these paintings is a map of the village, with Hasan Dağ erupting above it. It is argued that the excavator's first interpretation of the objects depicted in the painting, that is, that they are a leopard skin above a panel of geometric design, is in fact a far more reasonable one, when this painting is contextualised within the entire corpus of painting and other art objects found at the site. Implications of this re-interpretation for our understanding of Neolithic spatial and symbolic representation, and the origin of mapmaking are considered, as well as the importance of the depiction of animals and felines in the Neolithic period.

The location of the Temple of the Storm-God of Aleppo, one of the most famous cult-centres of antiquity, has long been a matter of speculation, but was finally revealed by excavations on Aleppo citadel begun in 1996. These have gradually uncovered the central cult-room of the temple with a rich inventory of sculptures datable to several phases of the construction. In 2003 came the dramatic exposure of a substantial Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription recording a dedication to the Storm-God by a ruler, Taita King of Palistin, incised alongside his own image standing in an attitude of reverence before the deity. This was followed in 2004–2005 by the discovery of a further, but broken, inscription on portal figures of the entrance, attributable to the same ruler. These inscriptions are datable by their palaeography approximately to the 11th century BC, a period previously regarded as a dark age lacking written records. They suggest the existence of a large and powerful kingdom in an area where the increasingly known archaeology shows an influx of people of Aegean connections bringing with them the distinctive Mycenaean IIIC pottery. A combination of the archaeological data and the evidence of the inscriptions begins to offer an outline history for this little-known age. This paper presents the first full publication of the inscriptions together with some comments on their background and implications.

This contribution discusses the Hellenistic, Roman and early Byzantine pottery collected during archaeological survey in the Bereket valley (territory of ancient Sagalassos, southwest Turkey). This collection contains both pottery imported from as yet unknown production centres and wares produced in the Potters’ Quarter of Sagalassos. Changes in the proportions of pottery produced at Sagalassos and those produced at other locations become visible in the fourthcentury AD material and reflect the evolving relationship between the peripheral valley of Bereket and the regional centre of Sagalassos. Yet, the undiminished quantity of pottery collected suggests that human activity continued without significant changes in habitation density. However, pollen cores from the same valley show that at more or less the same time crop cultivation diminished and was largely replaced by pastoralism. This shift occured at a time when climatic conditions had become more favourable for crop cultivation. A somewhat similar decrease in crop cultivation is also observed in Gravgaz marsh. In both valleys, this shift occured about 300 years earlier than in the rest of the territory of Sagalassos. Although the reasons for these changes cannot be determined on the basis of the study of survey pottery alone, the results presented show the importance of intensive survey and the study of peripheral areas for understanding inter-regional interaction patterns.

The purpose of this article is to describe here some of the material found during our survey of the Konya Plain in 1958. In two previous articles pottery of the 2nd millennium and the Iron Age found here have already been published. That of the Early Bronze Age, the most prosperous period in this area, will be described at a later date, and the present article will only describe the pottery of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods, under the following headings:

1. I. Neolithic cultures of the South Anatolian Plateau.

2. II. The Early Chalcolithic in the Konya Plain.

3. III. The Late Chalcolithic in the Konya Plain.

The importance of the Konya Plain in Anatolian prehistory is obvious. It is the largest single plain on the whole of the Anatolian Plateau with alluvial soil, and as such it is the granary of Turkey. No other region on the plateau shows such numbers of ancient mounds, or so many mounds of great size. The survey of this region, geographically as well as archaeologically a distinct unit, has at last linked the western plateau with Cilicia, and the results have shown that there is now a cultural continuum from the borders of Syria to the Aegean Sea since the Neolithic period.

In 2005, during the annual ‘intensive’ archaeological survey in the peri-urban zone of Sagalassus (Pisidia, southwest Anatolia), the remains of an extensive Classical-Hellenistic settlement were identified at Düzen Tepe, 1.8km southwest of Sagalassus. The results of three seasons of site investigation (2005–2007), comprising archaeological and geophysical surveys, architectural and topographical mapping, test soundings, and archaeometric and environmental research, are presented here, together with a discussion of the settlement's most probable socio-economic background. According to the latest results of all excavated or sampled survey ceramic artefacts and AMS C14 dating of faunal remains, the (proto-)urban settlement at Düzen Tepe was inhabited during the fifth to second century BC. It is the first of its kind to shed light on the material culture of the ancient inhabitants of the region, the ‘Pisidians’.

That part of northern Anatolia known in Greek and Roman times as Bithynia and Paphlagonia comprises a number of high ridges running from west to east, through which the rivers break their way in their tortuous courses down to the Black Sea. The region discussed in this article in fact comprises Paphlagonia, the eastern half of Bithynia and part of Phrygia, from the lower Sakarya to the mouth of the Halys; but, since these names do not apply to the Bronze Age, the whole will be termed northern Anatolia. As far south as the crest of the main ridge bounding the Anatolian plateau along its north side the land has a maritime climate quite different from that of either the plateau or the Mediterranean coast: rainfall is abundant, even at times in the summer; deciduous forests cover these north-facing slopes, right to the top. Sinop provides the best natural harbour on this coast. The change to the steppe country of the plateau is abrupt.

Ancient textiles in archaeological excavations are preserved only under unusual circumstances, and it is for this reason that the discoveries at Çatal Hüyük in 1961, and repeated in following seasons, of woven and twined materials possess an excitement out of all proportion to their visual appearance. Until these were found, the earliest woven fabrics known were from the Fayûm in Egypt which are usually dated to the fifth millennium B.C. The finds in Level VI of Çatal Hüyük push the history of the textile arts back to the beginning of the sixth millennium.

For textiles to survive in a more or less natural state requires either extremely arid conditions as in Egypt or Peru, or permafrost as in the Norse burials in Greenland, and in the tombs of the Scythian and Hunnish princes in Siberia. The presence of certain chemicals may act as a preservative: tannin in the Bronze Age burials in Denmark or metallic salts impregnating the fibres of the silks found in the patina of Chinese bronzes of the early dynasties. At Çatal Hüyük, a simpler agent is responsible for the survival of the fragments that have been found. In the fire that apparently destroyed the buildings of Level VI in which they were found, they were subject to intense heat. Due to the scarcity of oxygen in the space in which they were confined under the low clay platforms, the fabrics were not consumed, but only thoroughly carbonized. This made them chemically inert, and no longer subject to the growth of the destructive moulds that under normal conditions lead to the total decay of most animal and vegetal matter.

The following account of the origin, development and diffusion of certain metal types, which appear in Anatolia mainly before 2000 B.C., represents the first part of a larger study of Anatolian metalwork in the Bronze Age. The objects of this study are to bring the corpus of published material more up-to-date; to examine the typological development of the main types; to relate these types to local chronological and cultural divisions; and to indicate the wider relations of the Anatolian metal industry with other centres of production.

The need for such a study is illustrated by the fact that S. Przeworski's standard work on this subject, Die Metallindustrie Anatoliens in der Zeit von 1500–700 vor Chr., was published almost twenty years ago, at a time when modern excavation had only begun to lay the foundations of Anatolian archaeology.

More recently, Mrs. Maxwell-Hyslop has included some of the Bronze Age metalwork from Anatolia in wider schemes of typological development. But as this treatment tends to compress certain details of local evolution, which are important in a study such as this, I have often had to introduce a fresh classification in order to clarify the development of the Anatolian material. To avoid confusion I have used the prefix “Western Asiatic” to distinguish Mrs. Maxwell-Hyslop's types from my own.

Tell Tabara el Akrad lies about a twenty minute walk east of Atchana: to the north near the main road is Tell Akrad, and to the south the high conical Tell Saluq, now surmounted by a frontier post.

In the Atchana season of Autumn 1948 I visited the site and brought back samples of a hand-made burnished pottery, which was recognised by Sir Leonard Woolley as quite different from anything found either at Atchana or at the neighbouring Chalcolithic site of Tell Esh Sheikh. It therefore seemed desirable to make some investigation of the site in the hope of securing a representative collection of the pottery and establishing its position in the sequence of the plain. But it was already late in the season, and impossible to undertake anything as part of the regular work of the Expedition. For this reason I offered to make a small sounding at my own expense; to which plan Sir Leonard immediately acceded, and gave the fullest support and encouragement, providing equipment and every other facility for the work. Bay Ruhi Tekhan, Director of the Antioch Museum, kindly made all the necessary arrangements; and the sounding was carried out in five days early in December by Bay Baki Ögün and myself with ten men.

In 1984 the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA) began the excavation of a Late Bronze Age shipwreck, which lay close to Ulu Burun near Kaş, in south west Turkey. In subsequent seasons the Institute's excavation team, under the directorship of George F. Bass and Cemal Pulak, has systematically recorded and excavated a large area of the shipwreck, which has been provisionally dated to the 14th century B.C. Although the nationality of the ship is still unknown, it has been deduced that it was travelling from the eastern Mediterranean coast westward when it sank. The ship was carrying an exceptionally varied and rich cargo reflecting complex and sophisticated trading on a large scale. Amongst the items recovered in the 1986 season were fragments of a wooden writing-board set found in the sediment of one of the large pithoi (KW 252) carried onboard the ship. The importance and implications of such a find in the Late Bronze Age was recognized by Pulak who was able to loosely fit together the small fragments, enabling on site recordings to be made. Despite careful sieving and extensive searching, smaller fragments of the boards and one of the hinges were never recovered.

The end of the Çatal Hüyük West culture is shrouded in mystery. Both Çatal and Kara Hüyük South were apparently deserted and never reoccupied and it is only at Can Hasan Hüyük east of Karaman that later deposits have been recognised overlying remains of the early Chalcolithic culture. Elsewhere the evidence lies buried in the cores of the numerous city mounds of the Early Bronze Age period. Late Chalcolithic remains are fairly common in the Konya Plain, but they were in nearly every case found on sites where no earlier or later remains were encountered. This might suggest a shift in the settlement pattern of the plain after the end of the Early Chalcolithic period (see map, Fig. 1).

For some years the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara has intended, when circumstances permitted, to undertake excavations at a fortified site chosen from among the many situated within the region occupied by the kingdom of Urartu in the ninth, eighth and seventh centuries B.C. It was hoped that it would be possible to choose and to excavate an Urartian citadel in the area which may, in general terms, be described as the homeland of Urartu. Archaeological surveys had earlier been carried out in the districts near to and immediately bordering the shores of Lake Van. These were followed in 1964 by a survey of the region included within the Turkish administrative province (vilayet) of Muş. As a result of this survey, out of a total of some twenty-five sites of interest, one site was chosen as the most promising for excavations.

The site of the Cilician city known during the period of the Roman Empire as Caesarea, Caesarea by Anazarbus, or Anazarbus, is some 28 km. south of Kozan in the Turkish province of Seyhan. The place still retains its name as Anavarza, a hamlet built just outside the walls of the ancient city.

The choice of Anazarbus as a subject for research may seem to require some explanation. It was never one of the great cities of antiquity; indeed it is not yet certain that it even existed before the 1st century B.C. It never received more than scant notice from ancient authorities, while modern travellers, hampered by bad communications, a difficult climate, and a lawless population, were unable to spend more than a day or two at the site and consequently could not give more than a general idea of its monuments.

In 1949, as Scholar of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, I had decided to study the Classical architecture of Cilicia, and at the same time to collect information on the many mediaeval castles in the district.

I pass now to the eastern side of the central mountain range, to the ancient sites lying east and west of the main Burdur–Antalya road.

In the little plain of Çineovası, 13 km. from Burdur, about 300 yards east of the main road, just opposite the 110th kilometre-stone from Antalya, is a rocky hill some 40 m. high carrying a small fortified site that seems hitherto to have escaped observation. The top of the hill has been levelled to form an area some 25 by 15 m., surrounded on all four sides by a wall of excellent coursed polygonal masonry 1·20 m. thick (Pl. Va). On the west this wall merely supplements the precipitous rock-face; on the other sides it still stands to a height of some 5 m., and was originally much higher, as beds for polygonal blocks can be seen in several places in the rock-surface on the summit, and great quantities of these blocks are lying on the slopes below. In the interior are traces of four or five walls up to 1 m. thick, now flush with the ground, and a large rock-cut cistern some 5 by 4 m. and over 2 m. deep. At the south-east corner are the collapsed ruins of an ornamented building, the blocks carefully cut, with mouldings and clamp-holes; one of these blocks forms a shallow anta. Two architectural blocks apparently belonging to this building are lying in the cistern.

The beginning of the Iron Age is generally dated to the last quarter of the second millennium BC in Anatolia and the Near East. The development of iron metallurgy allowed many tools and weapons to be produced in this period. The earliest iron finds, which are not more than a dozen, occur in the third millennium BC in Anatolia (Waldbaum 1980 discusses these early finds). Considering that pure iron occurs rarely in nature, the most important question is: what were these objects made of? Preliminary analyses of a few Bronze Age finds show that some of them contain nickel. Because of this it is generally accepted and frequently cited that these finds were made of meteoric iron.

The second half of the third millennium BC has generally been accepted as the period in which urbanisation took place in Anatolia. Prominent sites of this period are described by scholars as ‘towns’, ‘town-like settlements’, ‘city-states’ and ‘proto-city-states’. The use of a variety of terms for the same type of site implies that there is no clear consensus on the conceptualisation of this transformational process. It is generally accepted that, from the Neolithic period onwards, Anatolia did not display a great degree of cultural homogeneity, both in terms of material culture and social systems. The topography of Anatolia is divided by deep river valleys and high mountain chains, and this may well have been a crucial factor in stimulating cultural regionalism. This article suggests that Early Bronze Age populations in Anatolia did not just experience the process of urbanisation, but also centralisation. Furthermore, it has been argued that certain areas of Anatolia at this time experienced neither urbanisation nor centralisation, but remained rural. This paper utilises archaeological evidence, such as settlement patterns, settlement layouts and types of material culture that have social implications, to explain these phenomena.

In another article in this volume, James Macqueen has re-examined the political geography of Western Anatolia during the Late Bronze Age on the basis of the Hittite texts. As long ago as 1957 we discussed these problems together at Beycesultan and the results that he has reached independently agree in all major points with mine, which are shown in Fig. 1. For the last fifteen years travel and exploration has carried me through most of the territory here discussed, and with this advantage the archaeologist is able to make a contribution towards the problems raised by the inadequacy of the texts which are not concerned with geographical details, but with politics. In a study of this kind an initial knowledge of the terrain and its archaeological remains is essential. In my opinion a thorough knowledge of classical, i.e. mainly Roman and Byzantine conditions in Anatolia is a definite disadvantage, for the conditions imposed by this essentially foreign occupation bear no relation to earlier patterns of settlement and the possibility of chance survivals of place names tends to distract the student of Second Millennium geography. Many of our troubles stem from rash identifications of place names of which one may single out those of Millawanda-Miletus, Lukka-Lycia and Ahhiyawa-Mycenaean Greece (or Rhodes) as key points in any geographical reconstruction.

A brief history of archaeological research at Gordion Piecing together documentary sources from areas to the east and west of Anatolia, historians agree that in the eighth century BC, central Anatolia was dominated by people who spoke an Indo-European language, Phrygian (Mellink 1991: 621; Muscarella 1995: 92 with refs). From historical sources we also know the location of the Phrygians' capital, Gordion: Quintus Curtius (Hist Alex III.1–2) states that the city lay on the Sangarios River ‘equally distant from the Pontic and Cilician Seas’. Using this description, Gustav and Augustus Körte travelled across Turkey more than a century ago looking for the physical remains of Gordion and Phrygia. They eventually focused on a mound lying adjacent to the Sangarios or modern Sakarya. The mound, now called Yassıhöyük, is large relative to others in the region, and lies in the proper geographical setting for ancient Gordion; a series of artificial mounds or tumuli scattered across nearby slopes provides additional evidence of the settlement's importance.