From Liburnian to Ottoman: Unraveling Settlement History at Nadin-Gradina, Croatia

Summary

Ancient cityscapes with long occupational histories have great potential for reconstructing changes in social structure, spatial planning, political governance, identity, economy, environment, and climate. Recovering such information, however, poses many challenges, both human and financial. Archaeological deposits are often deeply buried and palimpsestic, representing a complex mixture of processes including collapse, partial abandonment, repurposing, and reoccupation. Yet, anthropological inquiry into human societal organization and its coevolution with the physical world demands that archaeologists sort out occupational history and changes in the built environment with some degree of chronological precision. Such are the challenges, and opportunities, at the Nadin-Gradina archaeological site in coastal Croatia, where ongoing fieldwork is beginning to define the temporal parameters of its construction and evolution over the course of approximately 2,500 years – from a Liburnian hillfort in the first millennium BCE to an Ottoman frontier settlement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The results permit a series of more robust anthropological questions related to human response and adaptation to urbanization, landscape change, and climate over a span of centuries to millennia, while also opening the door to questions of cultural identity, colonization, and migration.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 17195