Reconstructing Anatolian landscapes

Reconstructing Anatolian landscapes:
Understanding the effects of geomorphic degradation on archaeological sites

Ben Marsh
Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies, Bucknell University

Massive environmental degradation is a hallmark of archaeological landscapes in Anatolia; this has been recognized since Vita-Finzi’s 1969 classic, The Mediterranean Valleys. Early and ongoing vegetation changes – from timbering, fuel gathering, grazing, and farming – exposed soil to vastly accelerated erosion. Erosion denuded hillsides, thinned or removed soils, and provided sediment to streams. Those streams eventually silted-in their valleys, buried nearby anthropogenic features, and ruined lowland fields. The loss of soil productivity decreased the size of populations that could be sustained within any area. Indirectly these processes dried out springs and impoverished formerly-perennial streams.

Understanding these anthropogenic environmental changes upon the archaeological landscape is important for three reasons. First, the changes were wrought upon the land by the actions humans, in many case during antiquity. Thus the changes are artifactual, and provide an understanding of how humans affected the world in antiquity. The degradation of the landscape is a human-ecological and an archaeological study in its own right. Second, landscape changes that began in antiquity frequently engendered responses in antiquity. That is, many sites under excavation are structured in part as a response to the degradation of the environment; human landscape degradation was itself part of the relevant environment for many settlements. Finally, any effort to understand an ancient human landscape must consider how that landscape looked different from its modern manifestation; that is, careful archaeological studies must be able to conceptually ‘undo’ the alterations of a site subsequent to its abandonment.

This last point, undoing the damage of the years, is most directly relevant to the study of Bronze Age water features. Water features are particularly vulnerable to degradation because they are situated at the bottom of the landscape and thus they may be affected by burial, by desiccation or by both. These ideas will be explored with Anatolian examples from Gordion, Sardis, Paphlagonia, and elsewhere.