Urban Dynamics in Roman Anatolia: Investigating the Emergence and the Development of the Roman City in North-Central Anatolia

Join us in person or online for a two day conference exploring urban dynamics in Roman Anatolia, co-organised by Middle East Technical University, Boğaziçi University, British Institute at Ankara (BIAA) and American Research in Turkey (ARIT).

Cities were central to Roman culture, serving as hubs for socio-economic, political, and religious activities across the Empire (Woolf 2020. While urbanism was not exclusive to Roman society (Zuiderhoek 2012), their conquests in the Mediterranean region spurred an unprecedented proliferation of cities, even in challenging environments such as the Central Anatolian Plateau. Roman city planning relied on standardized layouts, featuring iconic structures, such as squares, colonnaded streets, temples, and basilicas that remain recognizable today (Yegül and Favro 2019). Elite patronage played a crucial role in the development of cities, and, while urban centers flourished through benefactions, wealthy elites gained political prestige hastening urbanization through the Empire (Zuiderhoek 2012).

Scholarship on Roman urbanism, particularly in the Western Mediterranean, has been extensive (De Ligt and Bintliff 2020; Woolf 2020), and recent efforts, such as an ERC project led by De Ligt at Leiden University, aimed to catalog over 2000 Roman cities across the empire (De Lit and Bintliff 2020). Within this project, Rinse Willet’s study revealed numerous urban centers representing significant milestones in Anatolian urbanism (Willet 2020). Stephen Mitchell’s review, on the other hand, underscored the need to analyze anatollan urbanism from a regional perspective, emphasizing the difficulty of constructing a comprehensive narrative of this important phenomenon with the limitations of current data (Mitchell 2020).

The main goal of the conference:

With this challenge in mind, the conference “Urban Dynamics in Roman Anatolia: Investigating the emergence and development of the Roman City in North-Central Anatolia” aims to collect and examine comprehensively new archaeological evidence for the emergence and development of cities in Roman central Anatolia. while the central Plateau was comparatively less urbanized than the western and southern coasts, recent archaeological research unveiled an increasing wealth of data regarding its urban development. However, this evidence has yet to be examined contextually or integrated into studies of urban experiences during the Roman Period. This conference, thus, aims to underline the unique characteristics of Roman urbanization in this region, and bring it into a dialogue with other areas of the empire. Recognizing the vastness of the Anatolian Plateau and the non-uniform spread of Roman urbanism, our focus lies particularly on regions sharing similar historical trajectories and environmental circumstances. We, therefore, invite submissions that delve into recent archaeological discoveries along the river valleys of the northwestern portion of the central Anatolian Plateau, such as (but not limited to) the Upper Sakarya, Kizilirmak, and Yesilirmak valleys. These regions appear as focal points for the development of Roman cities, with decades of historical and archaeological inquiry yielding substantial yet unexplored data. Given the signIficance of this theme and its potential to enrich the understanding of Roman urbanism, the organizers are committed to publishing the conference proceedings.

To read the conference abstracts, click here

To register to attend in person, click here

To register to attend online (on Zoom) for Day 1 of the conference (Friday 21 February), click here

To register to attend online (on Zoom) for Day 2 of the conference (Saturday 22 February), click here