Place-Making and Social Systems in the Early Bronze Age of Anatolia: Bademağacı Höyük Settlement

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Tezin Türü: Doktora

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Yerleşim Arkeolojisi Anabilim Dalı, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2024

Tezin Dili: İngilizce

Öğrenci: AYŞE IRAZ ALPAY

Danışman: Evangelia Pişkin

Özet:

By the third millennium BCE, the place-making processes in Anatolia included the widespread emergence of a settlement pattern defined by a radial plan of agglutinated houses facing a central courtyard. The material and architectural characteristics of these particular settlements over time and their distribution in the Anatolian region have been the subject of several studies, but only a few attempted to investigate the relationship between the settlement layout and the structure of social organisation which was altered during the Early Bronze Age of Anatolia. The study aims to understand how the built environment functions in the emergence of the social structure, the nature of social organisation and the degree of social complexity in Bademağacı Höyük during the Early Bronze Age. To address the issue, an integrative approach is developed that combines Space Syntax Analysis together with artefact distribution, investigation of architecture, estimation of population and archaeoastronomical analysis. Based on the archaeological remains, the results suggest that buildings were employed to establish and maintain a general sense of community and social norms by encouraging cohesiveness and pressuring cooperative interdependence. Their locations and types indicate vertical and horizontal social stratification with lower degrees of heterogeneity and inequality and social leadership-like authority. This study also proposes that the degree of social complexity of a given society should be measured based on the number of differentiated relationships individuals maintain in a society. To address differentiated relationships, the social organisation should be investigated using archaeologically measurable variables: heterogeneity and inequality within a given society.