Owen Doonan

The nation states in the Black Sea area have initiated many co-operative policies but the area also sees numerous tensions between neighboring states. The conflict-co-operation paradox, along with ethnic fragmentation and shared culture, are two of the most salient features of the Black Sea Area. These paradoxes are not the only force in the evolution of the region though. There are also issues such as ethnic and national identity, the failure of democratization, energy and resources, as well as the influence of other powers such as Russia, the EU and the USA.

The key questions asked by the authors in this book are: to what extent is there an emerging regionalism in the Black Sea area? Is the Black Sea a region? What are the common interests shared by the former USSR states, the three EU member states neighboring the Black Sea - Bulgaria, Greece and Romania, and a NATO country - Turkey? Are the fault-lines dividing them more pervasive than the incentives for cooperation? Can we speak of a shared identity?

The first part of the book places the Black Sea problematique in a wider historical and spatial context. The authors then take a closer look at the region and examine further the structure of the Black Sea area. They offer a perspective on smaller actors with great ambitions, such as Azerbaijan and Romania, and go on to make a comparison between the emerging regionalism in the Black Sea area and regionalisms in other parts of the world.
Contents: Introduction, Ruxandra Ivan; Part I Identities, Space and History: Fluid histories: culture, community, and the longue durée of the Black Sea world, Alexander A. Bauer and Owen P. Doonan; Two axes, three seas: a geopolitical assessment of the wider Black Sea area, Nicolas Bárdos-Féltoronyi. Part II Structural Evolutions after the Cold War: Black Sea Cooperation and the Great Powers: The Black Sea area within the international system: the struggle for influence between the United States and Russia, Baptiste Chatré and Stéphane Delory; Energy politics in the Black Sea region, Radu Dudau and Armando Marques Guedes; Normative narratives of EU foreign policy in the Black Sea region, Cristian Nitoiu; The Russian factor in the wider Black Sea region: inconclusive status quo or a neo-imperial strategy?, Octavian Milevschi. Part III Regionalism in National Perspectives: New regionalization for a new regional leader? The role of Azerbaijan in the southern Caucasus, Samuel Lussac; Black Sea regional leadership in Romanian foreign policy discourse, Ruxandra Ivan. Part IV A Regionalism like No Other? The Black Sea in Comparative Perspective: Regionalism at the margins: East Central European and Black Sea regional cooperation initiatives in comparative perspective, Luciana Alexandra Ghica; A comparison of Caribbean and Black Sea regionalisms, Caterina Preda; Index.About the Editor: Ruxandra Ivan is a Lecturer at the University of Bucharest, Fellow, Romanian Academy, Romania and Associate Researcher, Université Libre de Bruxelles, BelgiumReviews: 'This is an exceptionally broad-ranging account of the significance of the Black Sea region. It covers everything from ancient history to comparative perspectives in the modern world, yet its clear focus on the nature of regionalism gives the work both coherence and relevance for the study of politics and international relations as a whole.'
Karen Henderson, University of Leicester, UK

'A valuable contribution to the literature on the international politics of the Black Sea region. The chapters in this book provide a comprehensive overview of the divergent positions of the different actors in the Black Sea region…an excellent starting place for anyone wanting to understand the complexities and contradictions of Black Sea regionalism in the twenty-first century.'
Andrew Cottey, University College Cork, Republic of Ireland

'At a crossroad between the former Soviet Union Southern Republics and the EU Eastern member states and Turkey, the Black Sea region is a controversial reality and remains underdeveloped and understudied. As such, Ruxandra's book provides a welcomed coherent collection of substantial chapters comparatively addressing the history, structure, and policies of this region. Both the multiple endogenous and exogenous factors of regional cooperation and conflict, notably US, EU and Russia, are taken into consideration and critically evaluated. The result is a well-focused and insightful contribution to the knowledge of progresses and shortcomings of a relevant part of regionalist comparative studies.'
Mario Telo, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium, and Member of the Royal Academy of Sciences

'This is a welcome and excellent addition to the literature on regionalism. An interdisciplinary team of scholars cover various aspects of Black Sea area regionalism and its limitations. Some chapters in this informative book also give valuable comparative perspectives that can contribute to conceptual and theoretical advances in regionalism studies.'
Finn Laursen, European Union Centre of Excellence, Dalhousie University, Canada

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Archaeological evidence, particularly that deriving from systematic regional surveys, offers great potential for understanding social and demographic change in Anatolia between 300 and 1200 CE. We first consider major factors inherent to regional archaeological data sets that complicate simple synthesis and generalization between projects. We then provide a synthesis focused on longue durée questions relevant to cross-disciplinary examination of the relationship between environmental and societal change and examine potential connections between major changes in settlement patterns observed in the seventh- and eighth- century archaeological data and larger questions of systemic collapse and resilience in the face of climate change. To conclude, we assess current archaeological evidence for the processes of agricultural adaptation at the transition associated with the end of the ancient economy.

The Sinop Regional Archaeological Project (SRAP) conducted its first
two seasons of excavations at the site of Sinop Kalesi in July-August 2015
and 2016. The excavation builds on more than a decade of survey and
environmental research in Sinop (Doonan et al. 2016) and ties in with the longer-term regional project through ongoing environmental studies, ceramic analyses, and regional scale archaeological research. Sinop (ancient Sinope) was one of the earliest Ionian Greek colonies in the Black Sea and the earliest colony on its Anatolian coast. The goals for these initial field seasons were to clarify the Iron Age and early colonial phases of settlement investigated by SRAP in 2000 (Doonan 2007), and to establish the stratigraphic relationship of the defensive wall to early colonial and pre-colonial phases of the site.

The Sinop Regional Archaeological Project (SRAP) conducted our first season of excavation at the Sinop kale during July and August 2015. Sinop (ancient Sinope) was one of the earliest Ionian Greek colonies in the Black Sea and the earliest colony on its Anatolian coast. The Sinop kale site is set directly overlooking the sea where a narrow sandy isthmus connects the mainland to a prominent basalt headland. The 2015 excavations produced evidence of Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation in connection with a dug-out structure, an Archaic stone-built house associated with Ionian ceramics, stratigraphic evidence for the contextualization of the ancient curtain wall, late Hellenistic destruction and a Byzantine curtain wall running parallel several meters of the west of the ancient wall.

The integration of high-resolution archaeological, textual, and environmental data with longer-term, low-resolution data affords greater precision in identifying some of the causal relationships underlying societal change. Regional and microregional case studies about the Byzantine world—in particular, Anatolia, which for several centuries was the heart of that world—reveal many of the difficulties that researchers face when attempting to assess the influence of environmental factors on human society. The Anatolian case challenges a number of assumptions about the impact of climatic factors on socio-political organization and medium-term historical evolution, highlighting the importance of further collaboration between historians, archaeologists, and climate scientists.

Initial report on the 2010-2012 Archaeological and environmental research program of the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project.  Highlights include (1) the archaeological survey of the Kirkgecit cayi drainage, the primary route from the coast of the Black Sea to the Anatolian interior on the Sinop promontory, survey of the Boztepe headland immediately above the urban center of Sinope, (3) the environmental study and archaeological survey of the Sarikum lake, results of luminescence analyses of precolonial handmade wares, and a GPR survey in the Sinop kale.

Link to article URL: http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/doonan351

The Sinop Regional Archaeological Project (SRAP) conducted its first season of excavation at Sinop Kale during July and August 2015, with major funding from the National Geographic Society (CRE 9318-13), the National Endowment for the Humanities (RZ-51768), British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, CSU Northridge, Queens College and Gonzaga University. Sinop (ancient Sinope) was one of the earliest Ionian Greek colonies in the Black Sea and the earliest colony on its Anatolian coast. The site of Sinop Kale is set directly overlooking the sea where a narrow sandy isthmus connects the mainland to a prominent basalt headland. The site, atop a 15m-high cliff above the shore, affords an unobstructed view of the coast in all directions. The site is ideally located for fishing and defensive purposes, and has little access to a terrestrial catchment more suited to a diversified agricultural economy. Fishing in this region is determined by the annual migrations of the major Black Sea fish species. These spawn in the shallow waters along the north coast and migrate in highly predictable cycles around the sea. The seasonal mobility patterns of these fish populations appears to have been a powerful determining factor that drove fishing communities to adopt mobile settlement strategies and stimulated incipient trade networks.

This paper presents results of the 2012 field season of the SInop Regional Archaeological Project, including systematic archaeological survey of the Boztepe headland, the land adjacent to Sarikum lake and the Kirkgecitcayi river valley.  Results of geophysical survey at the sites of Cakiroglu at the mouth of the Kirkgecitcayi valley and the Sinop kale are summarized, as are initial results of the study of late Roman red wares and luminescence dates for samples from the sites of Kocagoz, Gulluavlu, Maltepe and Mezarliktepe.

Colloquium abstract: The Sinop kale (citadel) excavations, initiated during the summer of 2015 with the support of the National Geographic Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, have provided important new evidence about the pre-colonial and early colonial phases of settlement and communication in the Black Sea region. These results place the earliest phases of the pioneering Milesian colonial port of Sinope in the cultural context of the Sinop promontory and that of the Black Sea and Anatolia from the late third to first millennia BCE. A remarkably diverse assemblage of Bronze Age, Iron Age and Archaic-Hellenistic ceramics demonstrate remarkably diverse links around the Black Sea, in western and central Anatolia, and the broader Greek world. Furthermore, our excavations have clarified the complex history and stratigraphy of one of the defining monuments of ancient Sinope: the fortification wall that established the landward edge of the city from the Archaic period to the end of the Ottoman Empire. The proposed colloquium synthesizes results of three seasons of excavation at Sinop kale in seven papers, including an overview of project goals and context, a discussion of the stratigraphy, and papers on a series of key topics by core team members. Co-authored presentations will be offered on Pre-colonial finds, Archaic and Classical ceramics, the construction and subsequent transformation of the Hellenistic wall, a previously unknown Middle Byzantine wall and an overview of floral and faunal finds. Each of these topics is breaking new ground in our understanding of Black Sea history. The pre-colonial results have suggested a pattern of mobile fishing in the region from the late third to the early first millennia BCE. The remarkable diversity of the Archaic and Classical ceramics provides insight into the unique nexus of connections for the first Anatolian Milesian colony and its own network of Black Sea colonies. The history of the Sinop fortification wall provides significant archaeological evidence relevant to the emergence of the Pontic Kingdom as a maritime power, while the history of the Middle Byzantine wall sheds light on one of the least known periods in the region and the naval networks that formed the foundation of the Genoese and later maritime systems in the Black Sea. " Sinope citadel excavations " offers the first detailed presentation of results from the excavations of this key site in one of the most critical but understudied regions of the greater Mediterranean and Eurasian world.

The Sinop Regional Archaeological Project conducted three seasons of excavations and remote sensing and one study season at the site of Sinop Kale in July-August 2015-17 and July 2019.  The excavation builds on more than a decade of survey and environmental research in Sinop and ties in with the longer-term regional project through ongoing environmental studies, ceramic analyses and regional scale archaeological research.  Excavations at the Sinop kale site are projected to continue for at least ten years, and encompass an extensive pre-colonial settlement and monumental structures from Archaic through Roman horizons.  The expanded excavation area includes the former bus station and Milli Savunma complex to the east of our recent excavations and the historical prison garden to the south.

The previous report by Sinop Kale Excavations in this series (vol. 2, published in 2016) sketched the evolution of the site in broad strokes: preliminary assessments of major architectural featuresn and illustration of a limited subset of finds from 2015-16.  This proposed report will cover findings from the 2017 season, including a rich deposit of early Iron Age ceramics beneath the Archaic structure in Op.1; detailed consideration of stratigraphy based on closer analysis of ceramic finds; discussion of significant floral and faunal finds; and synthesis of the results from Sinop Kale with a new study of the Sinope ancient city plan. Significant finds to be discussed in detail include a group of three Early Bronze Age figurines from the fills to the west of the glacis in Ops. 1 and 4; Iron Age closed vessels found with evidence of pre-colonial fish processing; a conclusive re-dating of the monumental wall a century earlier than is commonly believed. In addition, we discuss the results of remote sensing at the site including GPR carried out in the area west of our excavations (former Sinop Otogar) and a LIDAR scan of the Hellenistic city wall. We present the results of the 2019 study season including pXRF analyses of Bronze Age and Iron Age hand-made ceramics from the excavation and the regional surveys (1996-99; 2010-12).  The team is currently preparing a monograph on the 2015-17 excavations at Sinope kale, leading to a much clearer understanding of the stratigraphy and interpretation of major features of the site. The results of the 2017-19 field seasons at Sinop kale build on the preliminary findings of the 2015-16 seasons and are highly significant for our understanding of maritime interactions in the early Black Sea and Northern Anatolia and demonstrate the outstanding promise the Sinope Kale excavations hold for future research.