Virtual History

The archaeological site of Kültepe or the ancient city of Kanesh is a two-part urban center consisting of a 21-meter-high city mound and the fortified administrative quarter, mainly occupied by palaces and temples, surrounded by an extensive lower city that has conventionally been referred to as the kārum of Kaneš. The mound has yielded a long cultural sequence with 18 building levels dating from the Early Bronze Age to the late Roman period, whereas the lower city contains four discrete, well-defined horizontal strata. The earliest levels, IV and III, cover the transitional period from the late Early Bronze Age to the early Middle Bronze Age, whereas Level II, which has yielded cuneiform tablets, cylinder seals and ample other evidence for the presence of Assyrian merchants living alongside native Anatolians, dates to the Middle Bronze Age. We must emphasize from the onset that Kanesh has vast horizontal areas already excavated with traditional methods for almost 60 years. Most residential and nonresidential areas within the excavated portion of the lower city to date were previously emptied out with partial recovery of selected find categories; only street deposits were left intact therein. For this, the present excavation campaign at the site has adopted, since its inception in 2006, an interdisciplinary and integrative approach and focused on the implementation of modern recovery and analytical methods to ensure accurate, representative, and meaningful archaeological research. The ongoing excavations employ a rigorous sampling strategy and target intact and undisturbed contexts including houses, streets, workshops, and administrative structures for the representation of a multitude of activities at the site and to generate statistically viable, meaningful, significant, and representative sample sizes. A first and foremost goal of KIM 3 is to further explore approaches to the archaeology of complex urban sites using Kültepe-Kanesh as a case study. A special emphasis is placed on current multidisciplinary approaches presenting clearly-defined and theoretically-grounded methodological problems. The conference aims to integrate the whole spectrum of field and laboratory research that have been taking place and amassing new data at Kültepe since 2006 under the scientific directorship of Prof. Fikri Kulakoğlu of Ankara University. The subtext of the conference is to generate synergizing interactions among researchers studying the archaeological site of Kültepe or the ancient city of Kanesh.