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All archaeological landscapes degrade over time, but the landscape at Gordion is unusual in the way that the site has been directly attacked by the river adjacent to it. The damage to the cultural landscape by the Sakarya River is an indirect result of the environmental damage done to the river and its basin by human activities. It was human agency that ultimately resulted in the erosion and burial of Gordion. The human and natural landscapes in the region of Gordion have changed significantly since the Iron Age. Massive erosion in the uplands was initiated by early human landuse changes. That erosion cut into the hillsides, thinned soils, dried up streams and springs, and silted up the hydrological system. Sediment accumulated in the stream and river valleys, raising floodplains and burying topographic and artificial features. The overall effect of these changes on the archaeological record has been to hide or remove much of the evidence of complex patterns of landuse immediately around the Citadel Mound— structures, roads, city walls, gates, and earthworks. Determining the river changes is important because it tells us about both the nature of human impact on the adjacent uplands as recorded in the local landscape processes, and also the ways in which the site has been altered since its abandonment. Knowledge of changes to the site is useful for reconstructing the ancient city, and therefore for interpreting its archaeology. Landscape changes tell us about the nature of human-induced degradation of the nearby landscapes, and therefore also about the timing and intensity of causative human activities. In the case of sedimentation at Gordion, the evidence suggests that the local area was far more conducive to settlement than other parts of the Sakarya watershed, and it was settled earlier. In fact, the productive early settlement in this region might be a factor in the initial establishment of the city at Gordion. River-plain and lake sedimentation is one of the most important sources of evidence of settlement, landuse, and environmental change in ancient archaeological situations. Sediment provides a welldatable and more-or-less continuous record of local environmental and landuse history. River sediment yields information through the position and preservation of its contents—buried structures and artifacts —as well as from the sediment itself. Calculated sedimentation rates reveal the magnitude of environmental disruption in contributory watersheds; buried sediment texture tells of the rates of erosion and the character of earlier streams; and sediment color and geochemistry can disclose its changing source areas. Anatolian archaeology has benefited for decades from analyses of stream behavior and sedimentation. The earliest serious work, since highly reinterpreted, is Vita-Finzi (1969); more nuanced recent work is typified by Boyer, Roberts, and Baird (2006). These works and others like them have documented a series of environmental disruption events—perhaps the best known of which is the Beyşehir Occupation Phase visible throughout central Anatolia, recording a distinct agricultural intensification beginning in the late Iron Age (Bottema and Woldring 1990). The central presumption behind most sedimentation analyses is that streams respond to increased supplies of sediment by aggrading, and that the ma3 Reading Gordion Settlement History from Stream Sedimentation Ben Marsh 40 THE arCHaEoLoGy of pHryGIan GordIon, royaL CITy of MIdas jor source of Holocene increases in stream sediment is anthropogenic erosion. Certainly climate changes are relevant influences on stream behavior, but the unequaled magnitude, long temporal extent, and great spatial continuity of near-simultaneous Holocene sedimentation events across the Mediterranean basin strongly argue that the bulk of these changes were caused by the relatively abrupt arrival of humans , who are known to affect streams through accelerated erosion associated with land clearance and plowing, lumbering, fire, fuel collection, and grazing. The Environmental Situation of Gordion The Citadel Mound at Gordion lies on the plain of the Sakarya River a short distance upstream from its confluence with the Porsuk. Although it is now channelized for flood control, in historic times the river was shallow, muddy, and meandering. The topography and soils near Gordion are generally typical of central Anatolia, with steep hills ringing the site at a distance of 5 to 15 km. The region is characterized by extensive, unproductive, marl-rich plateaus to the south, west and north, but an unusually rich zone of low-slope, basalt-based soils dominates the rolling plains immediately east of the site, continuing over low passes to extensive plains stretching toward Ankara. The higher edges of these plains, at the foot of the mountains, are well watered with...

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