Article

Emergence of Local Trajectories in Southeastern Anatolia at the Fourth and the Early Third Millennium BC

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Abstract

This article will attempt to examine the appearance of local cultural dynamics and how the local societies in southeastern Anatolia were organized from the beginning of the fourth to the early third millennium BC. Until recently, it was believed that complex societies in southeastern Anatolia had evolved under the influence of Syro-Mesopotamian cultures. New rescue excavations, however, have shown that local complex communities had emerged from the beginning of the fourth millennium BC, before contact with the Mesopotamians. Morever, within even the Uruk period, a significant increase in socio-political and economic complexity resulting from contact with southern Mesopotamia is not seen in southeastern Anatolia. This period contained a number of local, complex, hierarchically structured socio-political formations that had grown in the first half of the 4(th) millennium. Even if indigenous people had adapted many Uruk-influenced cultural features, their material culture remained on the whole fundamentally local. With the collapse of the network of Uruk, the local occupational continuity and the social systems did not totally collapse in the region; rather they continued with the underlying local structure of previous periods. In this period, the region was characterized entirely by local developments such as fortifications, urban behaviours, platforms, large centers, prestige items, settlement pattern shifts, and distinct pottery styles zones, suggesting that the re-organization of the socio-political and economic structures of the communities in the region resulted from its own local trajectories.

How to Cite:

Erarslan, A. & Altaweel, M., (2009) “Emergence of Local Trajectories in Southeastern Anatolia at the Fourth and the Early Third Millennium BC”, Akkadica 130(2), 189–210. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/akkadica.99594

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