• January 8, 2026 | 2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
• Continental 7, Ballroom Level

3E: The Archaeology and Ecology of Anatolian Landscapes: Fieldwork Results from Yalburt Survey Project in the Hittite Borderlands (Colloquium)

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Sponsored by:
AIA Anatolian Archaeology Interest Group

Organizers:
Omur Harmansah, University of Illinois at Chicago

Discussants:
Jennie Bradbury, Bryn Mawr College

Overview Statement:
Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project is an interdisciplinary, fieldwork-based landscape archaeology, ecology, and settlement history project. It investigates the long-term history of settlement and landscape change in a microregion in the southwestern borderlands of the Hittite Empire in the modern Turkish province of Konya and districts of Ilgın and Kadınhanı. The Hittite king Tudhaliya IV commissioned the construction of two important water monuments in this borderland region: Yalburt Yaylası Sacred Pool Complex and the Köylütolu Yayla Earthen Dam. The survey project also aimed at contextualizing this imperial intervention in the longue durée of local settlement dynamics and landscape change. The diachronic history of the region is explored from early prehistoric settlement of the region with Neolithic caves and mounds to the incorporation of the region to the Phrygian cultural sphere during the Iron Age and to the eventual foundation of the Hellenistic city of Toriaion under the influence of the Pergamene kingdom, or the prosperous pastoralism in late Roman and Byzantine periods in the upland zones. Methodologically speaking, the project has featured a comparative perspective on Holocene and Anthropocene landscapes, comparing Hittite politics and practices of water and land management in the Holocene to the political ecology of water and land use in the postindustrial landscapes of Ilgın. As a landscape archaeology project set in a region with diverse environments, including a lake basin, river valleys, karstic pastoral uplands and verdant mountain terraces well-watered with springs, the investigators have advocated for studying medium-scale landscapes, the landscapes of human experience and movement. Medium-scale landscape analyses offer the fine-grained resolution and down-to-earth scale to discuss the embodied experience of taskscapes, movement across regions, transhumance, material flows between sites, and geomorphological change. Furthermore, documentation of cultural heritage and the forms of ongoing vulnerability of cultural heritage under late capitalist management of the countryside has also been the focus of the field operations in the project. In this session, the papers from various specialists in the project team will offer diverse perspectives on methodological and archaeological contributions of the project to western Asian landscape archaeology, including geomorphology, landscape ecology, material culture analysis, historical processes, architectural documentation, and cultural heritage.