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.

Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia is the first synthetic and interpretive monograph on the region and time period (ca. 3000-2200 BCE). The book organizes this vast, dense and often obscure archaeological corpus into thematic chapters, and isolates three primary contexts for analysis: the settlements and households of villages, the cemeteries of villages, and the monumental citadels of agrarian elites. The book is a study of contrasts between the social logic and ideological/ritual panoply of villages and citadels. The material culture, social organization and social life of Early Bronze Age villages is not radically different from the farming settlements of earlier periods in Anatolia. On the other hand the monumental citadel is unprecedented; the material culture of the Early Bronze Age citadel informs the beginning of a long era in Anatolia, defined by the existence of an agrarian elite who exaggerated inequality and the degree of separation from those who did not live on citadels. This is a study of the ascendance of the citadel ca. 2600 BCE, and related consequences for villages in Early Bronze Age Anatolia.

Despite the obvious presence of children and infants in each and every society their role in the ancient societies was a long neglected topic in the archaeology all over the world and the Near East is no exception. The concept of childhood and infancy and the attitude towards the youngest members of human populations only became a subject of sociological and archaeological studies in the last quarter of the 20th century. Even after the attention has been drawn to the topic of children, they still hold a secondary place in the scholarly debate. Burial customs are one of the sources to study the social structure and the intra-societal relations existing in ancient societies. Due to the complexity of those social interactions as well as possible multiple interpretations of mortuary behavior, they are a delicate tool that can often lead to misconceptions and therefore using them as sources of information requires special caution. Nevertheless, material remains of the burial customs are currently the only available evidence to study the adult-infant relations of the pre- and early-historic societies. So far no comprehensive study of childhood in the early urban societies of the Near East has been conducted and it is the author's impression that children are often thought to be considered non-entities by the ancient inhabitants of the region. This con-cept seems to be rooted in the practice of burying infants under the floors of houses rather than placing them together with the deceased adults in the extramural cemeteries. The current study was aimed at refuting this notion and presenting other possible inter-pretations of the child-related mortuary behavior. The analysis of evidence available for the area of the Levant for the period be-tween 3600 and 2000 BCE has led to two main conclusions. First, that such practice was not a common or long lasting custom in this region and second, that the children-related mortuary customs lend themselves to several interpretations and the one assum-ing infants' inferiority in the ancient societies does not find much support in the exca-vated evidence. Due to limited scope of the study the focus was placed on the spatial differentiation between the adults and the children, rather then on other aspects of burial domain such as funerary gifts or specific post-mortem treatment of the body. Two different patterns of child-related burial practices has been exposed in the coastal part of the Levant and in northern Syria/south-eastern Anatolia. In neither of them evidence of treating children as non-entities was sufficient to support this concept. On the contrary, in both cases it seems that infants and children were in fact treated in very similar manners and sometimes the youngest were buried in more elaborate or 'wealthier' burials than the adults, thus disproving their suspected inferiority. In the area of the coastal Levant the differential treatment does appear at times. A strong correlation of this differentiation and the periods of urban development and decline that can be observed in Early Bronze Age Palestine, points towards a major role urbanization and overpopulation played in shaping of the mortuary traditions of the region. The same cannot be said about the Syro-Anatolian section of the Euphrates ba-sin, where an entirely different pattern can be seen. There it seem that children and in-fants were usually treated equally with the adults in terms of the grave location and often also the grave type. Therefore, the independence of mortuary behavior from the age of the deceased was suggested for that region, even though exceptions were of course found. As a result of the study, the concept of infants' inferiority was in fact refuted, but the problem of the role of children in the society was not solved as much as exposed in its full complexity. A number of aspects of the study has to be studied in greater de-tail, of which the most interesting is the exact age at death at which the mortuary treat-ment changes (in cases where id does change). Unfortunately the published data are not sufficient to facilitate this study at the moment. Funerary equipment and differences in types of graves also call for more attention in the future analysis. Lastly the wider con-textual analysis involving determination of sizes and characters of the settlements to which the burials are affiliated will surely throw new light on our understanding of the way urbanization affected the mortuary traditions.