Profs. Ömür Harmanşah and Peri Johnson publish an article in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies!
"The Archaeology of Hittite Landscapes: A View from the Southwestern Borderlands"
Profs. Ömür Harmanşah and Peri Johnson along with other members of the Yalburt Project team have published a substantial article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies! Their article is entitled "The Archaeology of Hittite Landscapes: A View from the Southwestern Borderlands" and is co-authored with Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver ((Bilkent University) and Ben Marsh (Bucknell University). This article offers a new methodological approach to landscapes in the Hittite Anatolian context. The team put in the labor to discuss the state of the field in landscape archaeology and offered a novel methodological approach to focus on what they call the medium-scale landscapes and taskscapes, the critical scale of the human experience and practice.
Yalburt Project published a series of site reports and focused articles in the past but this is the first major attempt to portray what the landscape of Ilgin looked like in the Late Bronze Age. Maps and images in this article tell another powerful story about the medium scale.
Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project is supported by UIC's School of Art and Art History, and was funded by various grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Humanities Without Walls Consortium/Mellon Foundation, Suna-İnan Kıraç Foundation Research Center on Mediterranean Civilizations, and various units at UIC.
Abstract: This article layers material, physical, and textual landscapes of the Hittite Empire in a compact borderland region. We argue that a real strength of landscape archaeology is in understanding and articulating medium-scale landscapes through archaeological survey methods and critical study of physical geography. Medium-scale landscapes are a milieu of daily human experience, movement, and visuality that spawn a densely textured countryside involving settlements, sacred places, quarries, roads, transhumance routes, and water infrastructures. Using the data and the experience from eight field seasons by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project team since 2010, we offer accounts of three specific landscapes: the Ilgın Plain, the Bulasan River valley near the Hittite fortress of Kale Tepesi, and the pastoral uplands of Yalburt Yaylası. For each, we demonstrate different sets of relationships and landscape dynamics during the Late Bronze Age, with specific emphasis on movement, settlement, taskscapes, land use, and human experience.