Botanical Aspects of Environment and Economy at Gordion, Turkey

1. Archaeological Background

1 Archaeological Background The archaeological site of Gordion is most famous as the home of the Phrygian king Midas and as the place where Alexander the Great cut the Gordian knot on his way to conquer Asia. Located in central Anatolia near the confluence of the Porsuk and Sakarya rivers, Gordion also lies on historic trade routes between east and west, as well as north to the Black Sea. Very favorably situated for long-distance trade, Gordion’s setting is marginal for cultivation, but well-suited to pastoral production. It is therefore not surprising that with the exception of a single Chalcolithic site (Kealhofer 2005), the earliest settlements in the region are fairly late—they date to the Early Bronze Age (late 3rd millennium BC). The earliest known levels of Gordion, too, date to the Early Bronze Age, and occupation of at least some part of the site was nearly continuous through at least Roman times (second half of the 1st century BC); a Medieval settlement is also attested (Voigt 2005). Pre-Chalcolithic occupation in this part of the Sakarya valley is evidenced by abraded Late Paleolithic flint tools that erode out of Pleistocene conglomerates and occasionally turn up in flotation samples and other excavated sediments. The most prominent sites in the archaeological region in which Gordion lies are Gordion itself and at least 100 Phrygian-period burial mounds. Archaeological surveys have recorded sites mostly dating between the Early Bronze Age and the modern era (Kealhofer 2005). Gordion is comprised of the 13-ha Yassıhöyük (literally, “flat mound”), also referred to as the Citadel Mound (and in some earlier project publications as the City Mound), which is surrounded by an inner town and fortification system (Küçük Höyük and Kuş Tepe) that encloses an area of 51 ha. By the mid-1st millennium BC, settlement had expanded to an extensive outer town with an estimated total settlement area of about 1.5 square km (Ben Marsh, e-mail 9/16/08). The plant remains discussed in this report all come from excavations in the eastern part of the Citadel Mound. Gordion is known through both history and archaeology. The best-known ancient references to Phrygian Gordion and its king Midas are found in Herodotus’s Histories. Other ancient references, mostly Greek, occur in the works of Xenophon, Arrian, Plutarch, and Livy. Modern archaeological interest in Gordion came through Classicists’ knowledge of ancient Greek contact with the Phrygian world. The ancient settlement mound was identified as Gordion and excavated in 1901 by Gustav and Alfred Körte (Körte and Körte 1904; Sams 2005:10). A University of Pennsylvania team led by Rodney S. Young, a professor of Classical Archaeology, began excavations in 1950. Young’s excavations (1950–1974) focused on the Early Phrygian levels at Gordion and Middle Phrygian burial mounds. This work established a rough chronological framework for the region. Analysis and conservation continued under the direction of Keith DeVries after Young’s death in 1974. Fieldwork, however , was suspended until 1987, when a small team from the University of Pennsylvania Museum assessed the possibilities for a new project. In cooperation with the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Penn Museum renewed excavation under the direction of Mary M. Voigt in 1988. (For the history of the excavations, see DeVries et al. n.d.; Sams 2005; Voigt 2005.) Voigt established a stratigraphic sequence for the site based on the excavations of 1988 and 1989. Paleoethnobotanical research is an integral part of the renewed program of excavation and surface survey at Gordion. Since the 1990s, extensive excavation of Phrygian and later deposits has been carried out. 2 Botanical aspects of environment and economy at Gordion, turkey Analysis of those archaeobotanical remains has begun (Marston 2003, 2010; Miller 2007). Charred plant remains from Gordion provide the best evidence for tracing long-term changes in vegetation and plant use that in turn reflect many aspects of ancient economy and society in the Sakarya basin over several millennia. That the remains originate from a single site is an important limitation for a study that seekstounderstandregionaltrends.Nevertheless,many specific questions can be addressed with these data concerning the nature of the original vegetation, the relationship between agriculture and pastoral production , irrigation, and ethnic markers. This report deals with archaeobotanical remains dating from the Late Bronze Age to the Medieval period that were excavated during the 1988 and 1989 seasons at Gordion. The assemblage consists of charcoal hand...