Middle and Late Bronze Age Western Asia Minor: A Status Report

This article gives an overview of archaeological research regarding the settlements of the Middle and Late Bronze Age (approx. 2000–1190 BCE) in western Asia Minor. Most of the 33 excavations and 30 surface surveys outlined here are based on initiatives by Turkish researchers and were carried out between 1950 and 2021. The resulting catalogue currently includes 477 large (>100 m diameter) settlement sites in the region west of an imagined north-south line between Eskişehir and Antalya which we have recorded with their geographic coordinates. The second millennium BCE states in western Anatolia, to which these settlements belonged, have thus far been considered to be culturally, economically and politically less important than the contemporary Minoan, Mycenaean, and Hittite cultures on Crete, mainland Greece and in central Asia Minor. The size and number of these settlements, however, in combination with the fact that a distinct script, Luwian hieroglyphic, was maintained over a period of well over a millennium, prove the existence of a rich indigenous Anatolian culture, one that differs considerably from its well-studied neighbors. Future efforts to reconstruct the economic and political developments at the time of the Hittite kingdom (approx. 1650–1190 BCE) should give greater consideration to western Asia Minor. The subsequent kingdoms of Lydia and Phrygia are likely to have based their economic wealth and political influence to some extent on the preceding Late Bronze Age resources, infrastructures, and cultural achievements in this region.