The fourth and final season of excavations at Hacılar, carried out under the auspices of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, lasted from 1st August till 7th September, 1960. In spite of a number of difficulties such as shortage of staff, workmen and time, a most successful season of work was accomplished.

The Assistant Director was in charge, ably assisted by Mrs. Mellaart (housekeeping, accounts, registry and photography), Miss Clare Goff (surveyor) and Mr. David French (pottery expert). Bay I. Ebcioğlu represented the Turkish Department of Antiquities. Once more the expedition was accommodated in the large school building. For this final season we are especially grateful to Francis Neilson, Esq., Mrs. I. Ainley, the British Academy, the Russell Trust and the Munroe Fund of Edinburgh University, without whose timely help this season might not have taken place.

During the years 1953 to 1959, under the directorship of Seton Lloyd, with James Mellaart, the British Institute in Ankara carried out excavations in the mound of Beycesultan, the site of successive ancient habitations. The remains of cultivated plants recovered during this operation are the subject of the following communication.

Beycesultan is situated some 5 km. west of Çivril in the Denizli Vilayet of south-western Turkey. The locality is a flat upland plain in an intermontane valley at the south-western approach to the Anatolian plateau, some 2,500 feet above sea level. It is enclosed by low hills and watered by the upper reaches of the Meander river. The mountains above the plain are still partly wooded, and the drainage from these tracts accounts for the moisture and fertility which make the cultivation of cereals, pulses, poppy, grapes and fruit possible in the valley plain in spite of the comparatively low precipitation of some 14 to 16 inches. As suggested by the huge quantities of timber employed in the construction of the Middle Bronze Age palace the surrounding hilly area was once generously forested with oak, juniper and fir, but now the area is largely deforested in consequence of overgrazing.

The main purpose of this article is to publish material collected from surveys in Western Anatolia, Thrace and Thessaly which were made with the intention of discovering possible links between these three areas in the period which in South-West Anatolia is called Late Chalcolithic. Such suggestions as are put forward for the construction of a relative and absolute chronology in each area are only tentative; throughout the aim has been to emphasise the problems of equating pottery cultures of adjacent regions which are thought to be contemporary.

Among the Sultantepe tablets one attracts attention by its unexpectedness. It is, to quote O. R. Gurney's description,

The Sultantepe Tablets, I, p. 4, on No. 43.

Accounts of the campaigns undertaken by Assyrian kings did not ordinarily circulate along with epics, hymns, incantations and the other categories of texts which went to make up a library in an Assyrian town. Such historical accounts were incorporated in inscriptions composed to glorify the king concerned, and however busy scribes may have been multiplying copies during the reign of a particular king, the coming to power of his successor resulted in an immediate and total neglect of these inscriptions.

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.

An overland route by which oriental merchandise and ideas were transmitted to the Ionian Greeks via the Anatolian plateau and the river valley routes of the west was long ago posited by Hogarth, and supported by Karo, Barnett and others, although there was little evidence from central Anatolia to confirm it. More recently this route was virtually discounted in favour of a sea route from N. Syria, especially Carchemish, through the port of Al Mina, to Greece and Etruria, via Cyprus, Rhodes and Crete, discussed by Sidney Smith, Humphrey Payne, Mrs. Maxwell-Hyslop and others, which is assumed to have been at its height in the earlier eighth century; and Barnett has also shown the importance of a third route, from Azerbaijan to Trebizond and west via the Black Sea, for which the main evidence, a tomb group from the Caucasus, is probably later seventh century.

It is clear that the second of these three routes carried the bulk of Oriental trade to Greece and the west. Undoubtedly the most important Orientalizing influences on Greece, as shown by Payne, were those from the Cypro-Levantine cultural province, and there is ample evidence of the exchange of pottery, terracottas and ornamental bronzes of Cypriot and Phoenician production between the Syrian coast, Cyprus, Rhodes, Samos, Miletus, Chios, Delos and the west.