A Finer View of Regional Socio-political and Economic Change in the Southeast Aegean: Ceramic Production along the Datça Peninsula

Summary

Situated along the dramatic Datça Peninsula in southwest Anatolia, the port-town of Burgaz provides a flourishing landscape of ceramic production and valuable case study for investigating the intersection of local dynamics and larger Mediterranean social, political, and economic shifts. During the Archaic and Classical periods Burgaz developed into a thriving commercial and cultural center by virtue of its proximity to fertile land and centrality within the Gulf of Hisarönü. From the mid-fourth century, while the focus of civic life shifted westward to the expanded urban center of (New) Knidos, Burgaz transformed into a local agricultural and industrial nucleus connected to Knidos and beyond into the increasingly cosmopolitan early Hellenistic world. This paper presents the results of comparative visual, chemical, and mineralogical analyses of ceramics from Burgaz and several smaller settlements and workshops around the peninsula, arguing for expanding and export-oriented production from the fourth century onwards. Analyses of the transport jars and other pottery suggest that local settlements had now integrated into a regional economy and tied their fortunes to the larger export market at Knidos. Such abrupt and fundamental changes in livelihoods across Datça shed light on how local communities responded to new realities of the Mediterranean-wide network.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Wheel of Fortune: Ceramic Analysis and the Study of Technology, Exchange, and Sociopolitical Change in the Mediterranean and Greater Near East   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16530