Society and Settlement in a Territorial State: Survey and Excavations at the Outer Town of Ayanis, Turkey

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Elizabeth Stone and her colleagues will conduct archaeological research in the settlement area surrounding the Urartian fortress of Ayanis, located on the shore of Lake Van in Eastern Turkey. Occupied for only a single generation around 650 B.C., this city covers at least 80 ha. Prior work on the citadel has revealed extensive fortifications, large scale storage facilities and a pillared hall/temple complex, of the kind associated with the administrative elite at other Urartian centers. Ayanis is the only Urartian site that currently offers an opportunity to investigate the governed as well as the rulers, and an investigation of the outer town, through mapping, shovel test survey, magnetometry and selected excavation, commenced in 1997. With NSF support Dr. Stone's team will extend and refine its study of the relationship between the denizens of the fortress and those of the outer town. Shovel testing will define the limits of the settlement and extended magnetic field gradient survey will reveal subsurface architectural patterning over a substantial portion. Excavations will be conducted in areas within the outer town that exhibit differential patterning in the magnetometry. Analysis will focus primarily on high status materials such as red polished ceramics and bronzes that may indicate interactions between the central government and the larger population, and on economic reconstruction. Specific methods to be employed include: ceramic petrography; radography of ceramics to determine whether they were wheel-made or hand-made; neutron activation analyses of ceramics and bronzes to determine chemical composition; analysis of faunal remains; phytolith analysis; micromorphological analysis; statistical and spatial analyses of domestic artifact assemblages; the use of GIS to examine the spatial distribution of activities. The goal of this project is to determine whether the principles used by modern city planners can be modified to help identify key organizational distinctions in ancient cities and states. The variable distribution of people and institutions within the urban framework may be understood to reflect fundamental differences in the structure of ancient societies, between hierarchically organized territorial states and more heterarchically organized city states, but as yet too little work has been conducted on urban organization in different archaic states to be certain of this. The data generated by this project will make clear the organization of an urban center in an archetypical territorial state. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and students of urbanism on urban planning and its relationship to social organizationm, and a paradigm of the material imprint of a state that is known to be highly centralized. It will foster Turkish-American academic cooperation, and its results should help in the understanding of early complex societies that were either not literate, or whose writing has yet to be deciphered.