Agriculture and citadel in the Bronze Age Aegean: the view from western Anatolia
Keywords: Aegean
urbanisation
Bronze Age
western Anatolia
Late Chalcolithic
agriculture
farming
inequality
archaeobotany

This project aims to assess how agricultural production was adapted to the changing social and economic environments of Late Chalcolithic to Late Bronze Age western Anatolia. In doing so, it aims to suggest how arable farming contributed to the formation and collapse of elite social and economic structures within the citadel and lower town settlements of the Early Bronze Age (EB/EBA) II-III. This is achieved through a suite of analyses conducted on archaeobotanical assemblages from four sites in the Izmir region of western Anatolia: Liman Tepe, Bakla Tepe, Kocabaş Tepe and Çeşme-Bağlararası. In particular, stable isotope analysis of crop remains and functional ecological analysis of their associated weeds are used to establish crop husbandry and arable land management practices. These data are synthesised with archaeological evidence for the social morphology of settlements to provide insights into the organisation of the agricultural economy. They are also interpreted with reference to the climatic and ecological contexts of agricultural production.
The archaeobotanical analyses indicate that cereal cultivation was ‘low-input’ throughout the occupations of the study sites, with low arable fertility and limited mechanical disturbance. While variable, cereals tended to be grown on fields that received moderate to low levels of manure but were well-watered. In contrast, pulses were grown on more intensively manured plots that had correspondingly higher soil fertility and mechanical disturbance. This attests to a spatial differentiation in crop cultivation that resembles the practices of recent non-mechanised farmers in the Aegean engaged in extensive systems of land use. Land management strategies were adapted to the tolerances of different crops, with barley grown on drier fields than glume wheats in the Late Chalcolithic. A shift in agricultural strategies is apparent between the EB I-II and late EBA-early Middle Bronze Age, with a focus on drought-tolerant cereals cultivated on drier soils with water management practices redirected towards pulses. This was plausibly a response to drier climatic conditions following the 4.2ka event.
Extensive farming systems were integrated within varying social environments across the occupations of the study sites. In the Late Chalcolithic, potentially communal and highly visible extra-household storage may have been used to maintain cooperative relationships between small households in order to meet acute labour demands at key points in the agricultural year. The adoption of the longhouse as the basic socio-economic unit in EB I-II settlements was likely associated with more extended family households capable of achieving greater autonomy in agricultural production. This scenario of independent households engaged in extensive farming systems is likely to have created the potential for sustained high wealth inequality within settlements. This appears to have fostered the emergence of centralising social structures designed to dampen inequalities in arable production. Burial evidence from settlements with highly developed and corporate centralising structures, however, suggests that these ostensibly equalising institutions facilitated the emergence of high status and wealthy individuals. This suggests that they were the precursors to the elite economies of the EB II-III.