Turkey: Picturing a Long-Gone Citadel
Was a Bronze Age city in Turkey abandoned because of climate change or fire?
In the Late Bronze Age, the walls of the citadel at Kaymakçı rose 10 feet above the jagged bedrock surrounding it. Behind the fortification was a community of homes, workshops, roads, plazas, and great halls. The neighboring residences and cemeteries surrounding the citadel sprawled across 60 acres—larger than the site of Troy, the ancient city celebrated in The Iliad.
And then they were gone.
Chris Roosevelt, a College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of archaeology, and Christina Luke, a senior lecturer in the archaeology department and the CAS Writing Program, are leading a team of archaeologists who are trying to learn what life was like at Kaymakçı, and why the largest known Middle to Late Bronze Age (2000 to 1200 BC) site in western Anatolia (current-day Turkey) was abandoned. The archaeologists are studying items ranging from pottery to seeds to the teeth of animals that lived in the area, and they hope to reconstruct the site with help from computer-enhanced photographs.
Roosevelt and Luke have spent the past 10 summers exploring the second millennium BC site and its greater environs in the Marmara Lake basin. Working on foot and with drones, their team has found six fortified citadels, the largest of which, Kaymakçı, was the focus of this summer’s excavation.
“We believe Kaymakçı was the political powerhouse in the area,” Luke says. “The site was a very big, bustling city, and then it collapsed. No one knows why, but there were periods of large-scale fire. And then no one went back there to live. From an archaeological perspective, that’s fantastic, because otherwise we would have to weed through the layers of everyone who lived on top of the site afterward. We have in Kaymakçı what is called a pristine site.”
While they have yet to find proof of a written language at Kaymakçı, Roosevelt and Luke believe it was the capital city of a vassal kingdom mentioned in ancient Anatolian Hittite texts, whose archives describe a royal marriage with a king from the “Seha River Land,” the kingdom those at Kaymakçı probably ruled over. Luke says other written records suggest that the politically astute kings living at Kaymakçı would shift alliances frequently, not unlike the kings and chieftains in Game of Thrones.