Forging the Political Landscape in Iron Age Turkey (Chicago-Tübingen Expedition to Zincirli)
Project Manager: Dr. Virginia Herrmann
PhD Candidates: Nicole Herzog
PostDocs: Dr. Sebastiano Soldi, Dr. Doğa Karakaya and Dr. Katleen Deckers
This project comprises excavation and research at the archaeological site of Zincirli, Turkey, the Iron Age (ca. 900-600 BCE) city of Sam'al. This city was the capital of a small Aramaean kingdom on the cultural and geographic border between Anatolia and Syria, an area that alternated between small-scale autonomy and inclusion into the periphery of much larger regional or imperial polities, such as the Hittite and Neo-Assyrian empires. The project's primary aim is to investigate the relationship among political structure, settlement organization, social groups, and daily life practices, as the political landscape developed from post-imperial fragmentation to local territorial consolidation and back to imperial domination. This was the subject of the 2016-2018 DFG project 'Urban Landscape and State Formation at Iron Age Sam'al (Zincirli, Turkey).'
The recent excavations have revealed that Zincirli was also an important center in the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 1800-1600 BCE), with monumental architecture and evidence for participation in a long-distance trade network linking Syria and Anatolia. The current DFG project (2020-2021), 'Amorites and Aramaeans at Sam'al: Comparing Middle Bronze and Iron Age Urbanism and Economy at Zincirli, Turkey,' focuses on this period of the site's history and long-term changes in spatial organization, architecture, agricultural economy, and paleoecology between the second and first millennia BCE.