Agriculture in the “Land of Hatti”: The Politics and Ecology of Farming in Late Bronze Age Central Anatolia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Hittite empire is the first supraregional polity documented in the history of central Anatolia. The core of the Hittite polity, the “Land of Hatti”, extended on a landscape which could be regarded as particularly challenging to the establishment of a reliable and productive centralized agricultural system. The traditional Anatolian farming system relies on the timing and magnitude of the autumnal and spring storms, which are characterized by having a hectic behavior, resulting in unpredictability in agricultural production. The complex topography of central Anatolia, furthermore, determines a fragmented landscape, which makes communication and bulk trade over long distances difficult and promotes cultural fragmentation. In which way the Hittite polity confronted these structural limits imposed by the physical geography of the Anatolian Plateau? In this paper, I discuss the role that agricultural production played in both the establishment and collapse of the Hittite polity, based on a systematic review of the textual, archaeological, and archaeobotanical evidence of agricultural production in Hittite Anatolia.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37657.0