Landscape archaeology and political ecology in Anatolia: Yalburt Yaylasi Project 2014 Season

Summary

Since 2010, Yalburt Yaylasi Archaeological Landscape Research Project has been investigating the politics of Hittite borderlands in a region known as Pedassa in antiquity, currently located within the Turkish province of Konya. In 2013 and 2014 seasons, the project focused on the Kuru Gol Basin, a dried lake basin within the survey region, where Turkey's largest coal operated power plant and its open pit mine is planned in the next few years. Due to recent marginalization of this waterless landscape of resilient pastoral communities, previous archaeological projects assumed the Kuru Gol Basin and the highlands around Yalburt Yaylasi to be archaeologically arid, therefore supporting the decision to build the power plant. Instead, Yalburt Project team's work in the last two seasons documented a rich archaeological landscape of settlement mounds, cemeteries, fortresses, caves, and lowland settlements in the Kuru Gol basin. Following Yalburt Project's recommendation, the regional preservation council of Konya Province has registered numerous sites as first degree archaeological sites, thereby slowing down the imminent construction plans of the power plant. In this paper, the authors present the preliminary results of the 2014 season as well as the political ecology of the Kuru Gol Basin.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage