The social organization of the very large Iron Age city at the site of Kerkenes in central Turkey, dating to ca. 612-550 BC, was investigated by this project between 2016 and 2022. This was accomplished by using multiple methodologies over 3 1/2  field seasons that included excavating 1,567.5m² across three different urban blocks, surveying 349,200m² with electrical resistance remote sensing to identify 4,497 unique buildings in the plan of the buried city, and analyzing artifacts and ecofacts from the excavations including those found in the 10,460 liters of collected soil samples.

Excavations focused on one urban block in the northern part of the city, named Urban Block 8. Urban blocks at Kerkenes are walled compounds that form key elements of the city's plan and contain assorted buildings and open areas. Numerous activity areas were identified by the team in the large contiguous excavations in Urban Block 8 including areas for food preparation, storage, and the hosting of public events. The remains of a last feast held in a public hall were also identified, consumed days or weeks before the short-lived city was destroyed with fire. Even evidence of the paths of individual acts of looting during the destruction of the city were discovered. No evidence for households were yet found in the excavations of Urban Block 8, but additional smaller scale excavations in two nearby urban blocks, 7 and 20, yielded evidence more in line with possible households. Evidence for regional and interregional trade and interactions have been discovered through material analysis and production practices found across several types of artifacts including amber inlays, glass beads, metal objects, and ceramics.

The evidence from the excavations for the range of activities that are identified as having taken place in particular building types is being leveraged through the remarkable geophysical data into larger understandings of the social and political organization of the city. Specifically, the plan of the 4,497 buildings discovered in the geophysical data, covering 1/3 of the total area of the city, is being combined with the results of the excavations using a range of modeling and simulation methodologies. These include a PhD dissertation modeling the clustering and accessibility of storage rooms to assess if the organization within the city was more hierarchical or heterarchical, ongoing work to model small world networks and neighborhoods within the city, and another PhD dissertation using cellular automata simulations to detail the spread of the final fateful fire that destroyed the ancient city. Presentations and preliminary publications on this work have been completed during the course of the project and more, including the two PhD thesis, are planned to be completed over the course of the next year.

The impact of this project lies both in archaeology and broader interdisciplinary research within urban studies. Very few archaeological projects have anywhere close to a plan of a single period of settlement encompassing 4,497 buildings. This is a unique dataset within the late Iron Age in Anatolia is an important contribution to understandings of both local history and that of the broader Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions. It also offers an ideal laboratory for developing and applying methodologies for exploring social dynamics within a large, non-western planned city. Already several innovative applications have been developed or applied by the project with broader applicability to other cities in the past and the present including transportation models, fire simulations, and spatial analysis of social organization. With over half of the world's population and 80% of the United States' population now living in cities, it is a critical to understand the processes at work behind urban social organization and interactions from an interdisciplinary and multicultural perspective. This project provides an important perspective from the past. Additionally, during the time of the award, the Kerkenes Project has tested on site innovative 3D drawing software for augmented reality headsets. The DATCH software (datchucf.org) was developed with separate funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and more recently from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and has potential impacts across field sciences. Finally, the project had significant impacts on students and the local community. Involvement by local stakeholders in the project has been strengthened by publications in both Turkish and English. The data from the project is being used in presentations, curriculum, and theses for students from elementary school through graduate studies around the world. Students have also been involved in all levels of the project, from participation to leadership, benefitting both the students and the project. Former students have attained postdoctoral positions in various countries as well as permanent faculty positions at Sydney University and at Leiden University during this award, further expanding the global impact of the project and setting it up for sustainable success.

Last Modified: 01/29/2023
Modified by: Scott Branting