Covers the Late Bronze Age remains.

The mound of Beycesultan was excavated for six consecutive seasons 1954-9, by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara under the direction of Mr. Seton Lloyd. It is a very large mound, dominating the more fertile end of the Civril valley, through which the upper reaches of the River Menderes (Meander) wind down from their source at Dinar. In selecting this mound as the object of a long-term excavating programme in 1953, the Council of the institute were guided by two parallel lines of approach. One was a proposed attempt to investigate the location and history of the great Anatolian state called Arzawa in the Hittite period. The other was the selection of a site at which a true archaeological cross-section could be obtained of a major Bronze Age city in the heart of Western Anatolia.

Report on the Middle Bronze Age Architecture and Pottery from the 1954-9 excavations.

Bringing together expert voices and key case studies from well-known and newly excavated sites, this book calls attention to the importance of western Anatolia as a legitimate, local context in its own right. The study of Early Bronze Age cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean has been shaped by a focus on the Levant, Europe, and Mesopotamia. Geographically, western Anatolia lies in between these regions, yet it is often overlooked because it doesn't fit neatly into existing explanatory models of Bronze Age cultural development and decline. Instead, the tendency has been to describe western Anatolia as a bridge between east and west, a place where ideas are transmitted and cultural encounters among different groups occur. This narrative has foregrounded discussions of outside innovations in the prehistory of the region while diminishing the role of local, endogenous developments and individual agency. The contributors to this book offer a counternarrative, ascribing a local impetus for change rather than a metanarrative of cultural diffusion. In doing so, they offer fresh observations about the chronology and delineation of regional cultural groups in western Anatolia; the architecture, settlement, and sociopolitical organization of the Early Bronze Age; and the local characteristics of material culture assemblages. Offering multiple authoritative studies on the archaeology of western Anatolia, this book is an essential resource for area research in western Anatolia, a key reference for comparative studies, and essential reading for college courses in the archaeology and anthropology of sociopolitical complexity, European and Mediterranean prehistory, and ancient Anatolia.