Anthropologist Uncovers Lost Culture in Turkey; Wins Service Award and $10,000 GrantSteadman, an associate professor of anthropology, said her excavation team has made several key discoveries at Cadir Hoyuk that have led to greater understanding of the people who lived there over a period of 6,300 years. Ronald Gorny, a research associate at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and director of the Cadir Hoyuk project, said he originally hired Steadman because of her expertise in prehistoric cultures...
SUNY Cortland News
5/18/2006
Steadman, coordinator of the International Studies Program at SUNY Cortland, said the major finding excavators have made at the site was determining that Cadir Hoyuk was a sophisticated settlement in the prehistoric, Hittite and Byzantine eras. Up until the team’s work, researchers assumed that the region was "a backwater with a bunch of podunks living there and doing nothing," she said.
In the prehistoric period, dating from 5200 to 3000 B.C., excavations showed that the settlement had large-scale architecture and that the site was enclosed by a wall, suggesting that the inhabitants felt they might be invaded. The archaeologists have found an open high place, facing the highest mountain at the site, which may have served as a ritual area. A collection of pots unearthed in a building in this section may have been used to make offerings of food to the deities, Steadman said...
In the Hittite era, from about 1800 to 1200 B.C., when Turkey’s first empire was established, the settlement served as either an administrative or religious center. The team has revealed monumental architecture dating to this period, including a gateway to the city and major public buildings, which indicates that the site was important to the Hittite rulers.
I wanna get me some of that Hittite plexiglas dinnerware.
So this walled settlement began about 7,200 years ago. This would roughly coincide with the eruption of Mt. Mazama (Crater Lake) which left a 6 mile diameter caldera. There was probably some real nasty weather as a result, which could have increased warfare and raiding for food, and the need for walled towns.