This thesis develops our understanding of changing patterns of woodland resource use during the Bronze and Iron Age of central Anatolia. The central Anatolian region is characterised by an anthropogenic landscape, a product of millennia...
moreThis thesis develops our understanding of changing patterns of woodland resource use during the Bronze and Iron Age of central Anatolia. The central Anatolian region is characterised by an anthropogenic landscape, a product of millennia of use by foragers and farmers, including intensive exploitation in recent millennia for agropastoralism. For all its societies, mobile or sedentary, wood was a key resource, used for fuel, construction, and craft materials. During the Bronze and Iron Ages, highly sophisticated and urbanised agropastoral societies developed across central Anatolia, including the regionally significant Hittite Empire. However, our understanding of woodland use, structure and management in the period is poorly developed. Here I investigate Bronze and Iron Age wood exploitation by examining how the inhabitants of Kaman-Kalehöyük (Kırşehir Province, Turkey) utilised the woodland around the site during over an approximately 1,700-year span of occupation from c 2,000-300 cal BC.
The expectation arising from this social milieu is that woodland must have competed for space with agricultural lands and that the increasing pressures urbanism and centralised control of grain supply would have resulted in deforestation of the local woodland surrounding agricultural production sites such as Kaman-Kalehöyük. To interrogate this hypothesis, this study applies wood charcoal analysis (anthracology) to investigate woodland structure, use, and management, generating the first large scale, diachronic anthracological investigation from central Anatolia from this period. The investigation includes taxonomic identification and quantification of wood charcoal along with dendrological examination of the dominant taxon, deciduous oak (Quercus spp.) and ecological and behavioural approaches are used to interpret the results. The data are examined and compared to environmental proxies such as pollen data and other anthracological investigations along with climate records relating to the region. Further, the analysis is situated in the social, cultural, and economic landscape that existed during the Bronze and Iron Age periods. The analysis is presented as a thesis including several publications with additional text to provide a detailed account of the project rationale, background, and to draw the discussion together.
The taxonomic data show that the dominant taxon, oak, was in use for the entirety of the study period and peaked in use during the Late Bronze Age Hittite Empire occupation. The peak in oak use was immediately followed by a spike in pine (Pinus spp.) and an increase in the number of taxa exploited from the Early Iron Age onwards. Complementary dendrological results also indicate that the Late Bronze Age showed dominant use of large trees, including trunk and root wood. When behaviourally specific modelling was incorporated, the results show that the inhabitants of all occupation phases selected the wood most frequent in the landscape with little attention to other variables such as distance, fuel value, and construction value. However, when compared to the regional pollen data, the Kaman-Kalehöyük wood data differ, especially when related to pine, leading to the possibility that despite intensive use of oak woodland on the plain surrounding the site, pine forests were avoided until the demise of the Hittites. Consequently, we do not see the deforestation event expected within this period of rapidly changing social structure. Rather, we see specific occupation periods linked to unique signatures of woodland use.
This study shows the value of combining taxonomic and dendrological analyses along with OFT modelling to gain a more comprehensive and detailed picture of past woodland resource use by demonstrating clear changes in woodland acquisition that are synchronous with changes in occupation at the site. Each of these changes, in turn, offer a unique insight into the decision-making practices of the inhabitants of Kaman-Kalehöyük filling a conspicuous void in our knowledge of the region for the study period.
