http://hdl.handle.net/2451/38143 2026-04-12T08:59:30Z http://hdl.handle.net/2451/74525 Title: Farming the land of Hatti: a socio-economic history of agriculture in Central Anatolia from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period Authors: Castellano, Lorenzo Abstract: The aim of this dissertation is to provide a multidisciplinary and diachronic reconstruction of Anatolian agricultural systems, focusing on the period from the Early Bronze Age (3000 BCE) to the incorporation of Asia Minor under Roman rule (1st century BCE/CE). This project is built upon a survey of the available primary sources, including archaeological data, archaeobotanical evidence, paleoenvironmental sequences, textual accounts, and ethnographic records. Evidence from literature is complemented by an extensive original archaeobotanical (wood charcoal and seed/fruit remains) and archaeological dataset from the site of Niğde-Kınık Höyük (Turkey), which has been obtained in the framework of the dissertation project. The volume is organized in three parts, as briefly summarized below. Part I, Agriculture in Pre-Roman Central Anatolia: Contexts, Sources, and Questions. This part of the dissertation is composed by two chapters. In Chapter 1, I provide a general introduction to the historical and environmental contexts covered by the project. The specificities of the Anatolian physical geography are discussed, and the regional socio-cultural and historical trajectory is outlined. Chapter 2 is a literature survey of the available primary sources informing on ancient Anatolian agriculture. After a methodological introduction to each specific field, the published archaeobotanical, palynological, and textual sources are critically reviewed. Part II, The Agricultural Landscape of the Ancient Tyanitis (Southern Cappadocia) in the Late 2nd and 1st Millennia BCE: Archaeological and Archaeobotanical Evidence from Niğde-Kınık Höyük. The second part of the dissertation is based upon original archaeological and archaeobotanical research I have conducted at the site of Niğde-Kınık Höyük, in southern Cappadocia (Turkey). This extensive original dataset allows to reconstruct the history of the southern Cappadocian agricultural landscape, from the late 2nd to the end of the 1st millennia BCE. In Chapter 3, I provide a general introduction to the physical geography, history, and archaeology of the study region, the historical Tyanitis. Chapter 4 concentrates on the large-scale granaries brought to light at Niğde-Kınık Höyük, which are radiocarbon dated to the 10th century BCE. Already in the early 1st millennium BCE, agricultural production appears to have represented a pivotal aspect of the local political economy, which hints to the presence of a surplus-oriented centralized agriculture. The evidence of large-scale storage from Kınık Höyük is discussed in relation to the regional and supraregional political and economic history. In Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, I present and discuss the results of the archaeobotanical study conducted on samples from Kınık Höyük, respectively on wood charcoal (Chapter 5) and seed/fruit remains (Chapter 6). The evidence collected indicates a progressive expansion of the cultivation of water-demanding crops throughout the 1st millennium BCE, peaking in the Achaemenid and Hellenistic period. Viticulture and arboriculture appear, in particular, to have represented a cultural and economic hallmark of this thriving agricultural landscape. Part III, Agriculture in Pre-Roman Central Anatolia: from the Emergence of Complex Societies to the Beginning of Roman Rule. In the final part of the volume, I provide a diachronic reconstruction of Anatolian agricultural systems, which is based on the published and original evidence outlined in the previous chapters. In this multidisciplinary narrative, the regional agricultural history is discussed in connection to the local environmental setting, paleoclimate, and socio-cultural and political history. The picture that emerges is characterized by a high degree of local complexity and specialization in agropastoral economies. In this part of the dissertation, among several other topics, I discuss the role played by agriculture in the formative processes of the Hittite polity, the degree of continuity and discontinuity in agricultural systems across the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age transition, and the flourishing of viticulture and arboriculture during the 1st millennium BCE. The dissertation aims to provide a reference work on the history of agriculture in Asia Minor, targeting a multidisciplinary readership. The Anatolian trajectory is discussed in a supraregional framework, engaging with central debates in Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia history and archaeology. 2022-05-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2451/74514 Title: Political and Cultic Landscapes in the Northeast Mediterranean, ca. 1175-675 BCE: Institutional Change and Identity Making Authors: Lovejoy, Nathan Abstract: This dissertation investigates the political and cultic history of the northeast Mediterranean during the Iron Age (ca. 1175 to 675 BCE) through an analysis of institutions and their connections to group identities. After the sociopolitical upheaval at the end of the Late Bronze Age, this region experienced a period of rapid regeneration and cultural differentiation. Rather than prioritizing a narrative of Late Bronze Age legacy or of Mediterranean new-comers and Aegeanization, this project aims to situate the trajectories of local traditions and innovations within regional trends through a micro-regional and multi-scalar model of glocalization. It attempts to define the modes of interaction between different communities and developments within new Iron Age entities through an investigation of material proxies and the textual record of the region. While a wealth of archaeological investigations and event histories concerning this region have been produced in recent years, a proper historical work that considers archaeological and epigraphic sources to investigate social, political, and cultic processes from the transitional phase of the Early Iron Age into the Neo-Assyrian period in this region is still lacking. The goal of this project is essentially threefold: first, it aims to provide an analysis of the developing forms of political rule, the interactions between local small kingdoms and more distant political entities, local responses to imperial pressures at the hands of Assyria, and the legacy of Bronze Age traditions and Iron Age innovations; second, it strives to illustrate regional and local trends in cultic practice with attention to continuity and change in cult space, representations, and the conceptualization of deities as a means of defining community identities centered around certain cults. Building upon the first two goals, it also seeks to understand the ways in which participation in political and cultic institutions helps shape individual and group identity making through a diachronic and micro-regional approach to the material and textual indices of the past. Lastly, the project attempts to identify synchronic developments across both the political and cultic spheres of society, in order to understand any connectivity between specific sociopolitical and cultic processes. In addition to the inherent value of a micro-history of the region, this project provides a novel interpretation of the political and cultic landscapes of the Iron Age in a central region of the eastern Mediterranean following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age political network and social structure. 2023-05-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2451/74513 Title: Feeding Status: A Comparative Study of Animal Foodways and Social Status in the Chinese Bronze Age (Guandimiao, Anyang, and Zhougongmiao, 13th-8th Century BCE) Authors: Zhang, Yan Abstract: In the dissertation, I generally investigate how the analysis of animal bone remains, as well as ceramic vessels from residential contexts and correlated human skeletons from tombs, can shed light on the relationship between foodways and social status in the Chinese Bronze Age. This study is based on archaeological work at three sites, Guandimiao 關帝廟, Xiaomintun 孝民屯, and Zhougongmiao 周公廟, which cover the core area of the Chinese Bronze Age in the Central Plains, extend from the late Shang period (13th-11th century BCE) to the Western Zhou period (11th-8th century BCE), and represent settlements of different contexts (rural vs. urban, Shang vs. Zhou). Animal remains of the three sites can roughly be attributed to daily food waste of local residents, the vast majority of whom are people of lower status and have long been neglected in received texts and by most historical and archaeological studies. The main part of this dissertation focuses on solving the basic question of how animal food was prepared and consumed by non-elites in this period. A review and discussion of animal food production shows that meat consumption was based on a relatively stable structure of animal husbandry in this period, which offered reliable meat resources for both rural and urban settlements and also allowed the development of some degree of separation and specialization in production at the same time. Most of my work is on analyses of patterns of bone modification (bone breakage and butchery marks), as well as the regular skeletal element representation which reveals many details of cattle and pig butchering and meat cooking in communities of non-elites. It shows that large animal carcasses were processed following roughly similar procedures in the three sites. And, meanwhile, the rich evidence shows an interaction of butchery techniques, available tools, butchery skills and butchers, preparation and consumption vessels and techniques, and possibly other cultural variables (such as gustatory preference) distinguish the three social groups. The comparisons prove that, in stratified Shang and Western Zhou societies, there was significant differentiation even between non-elites (urban vs. rural, and Shang vs. Zhou) and it was prevalent indeed in the details of daily life. It will be very interesting to further discuss the underlying causes and implications. It should be pointed out that this study offers a chance to reconstruct the social life of communities of non-elites, especially that of the small rural settlement Guandimiao. Analysis of Guandimiao indicates the poverty and uniformity of the rural households and a relatively loose village-level organization. It suggests a degree of independence of the community as a unit in daily life, while it had to depend on outside powers and communities as previous studies have shown. In addition, I would like to emphasize the methodological purpose of this dissertation, which aims to explore a possibility to excavate new information from animal bones in the study of complex societies in China based on studies of the most common animal bone remains from daily food waste. Following this method, close attention should be paid to evidence on bone modification and the analysis of taphonomic attritions. This dissertation demonstrates both the viability of this kind of approach in Chinese archaeology and its necessity. 2022-09-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/2451/64391 Title: The Little Astronomy and Middle Books between the 2nd and 13th Centuries CE: Transmissions of Astronomical Curricula Authors: Roughan, Christine Abstract: This dissertation examines the transmission of two astronomical curricula: the Little Astronomy of Greek late antiquity and the Middle Books of the medieval Islamicate world. The Little Astronomy is usually understood to have comprised a group of approximately nine ancient Greek texts: Theodosius’s Sphaerica, Autolycus’s On the Moving Sphere, Euclid’s Optics, Euclid’s Phaenomena, Theodosius’s On Habitations, Theodosius’s On Days and Nights, Aristarchus’s On Sizes and Distances, Autolycus’s On Risings and Settings, and Hypsicles’s Anaphoricus. All of these treatises were translated into Arabic by the end of the ninth century CE, and these translations came to serve as the core of the Middle Books – a grouping named as such because they were the books to be read between Euclid’s Elements and Ptolemy’s Almagest. The existence of a collection called the Middle Books is well-attested by contemporary sources; that of the Little Astronomy is less so. This dissertation therefore sets out to establish the evidence for these respective groupings, examining when they existed, what form they took, and how they developed over time. It determines that the Little Astronomy and Middle Books both comprised a persistent core series of treatises set out in a logically ordered arrangement, sometimes accompanied by other treatises at different points in time. The dissertation then turns to philological analyses to establish the influence of the curricular context on the transmission of the component texts. I argue that many of the changes introduced into these texts by late antique and medieval editors can be identified as motivated by the didactic use of these curricula, and that these contributions speak to how copyists, teachers, and editors in different contexts perceived of their own relationship to a long-lived astronomical tradition. 2023-01-01T00:00:00Z