Location Türkiye
Years 2024-2025
Director
Dr Müge Ergun
University of Oxford
Funding University of Oxford (John Fell Fund) / BIAA
The aim of the project is to generate pilot data from Neolithic Aşıklı Höyük and Balıklı to elucidate the full story of agricultural emergence and plant domestication processes in the region.
Recent archaeological discoveries in volcanic Cappadocia, combined with novel and refined archaeological methods, promise a breakthrough in understanding of how early cultivation, herding and householding co-evolved in western Asia. The proposed project analyses recently excavated plant remains of some of the world’s earliest sedentary villages using newly developed techniques for characterising crop cultivation practices and cereal taxonomy. The project focuses on two early Neolithic sites in the region, Aşıklı Höyük and Balıklı, which together provide distinctive sequences of human occupation from the mid-9th to later 8th millennia BCE.
Müge is an archaeologist and archaeobotanist focusing on plant management strategies throughout prehistory, with a particular interest in the onset of agricultural lifeways. Their research further extends to understand the socio-cultural and ecological aspects of people-plant interactions. They received a Ph.D. degree from the Istanbul University and the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University (co-tutelle, 2016). They are currently a researcher co-investigator in this project, Agricultural Origins in the Greater Fertile Crescent, in the University of Oxford, and a visiting scholar in the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research in the University of Cambridge. They were a post-doctoral researcher in the ERC Synergy Grant ‘EXPLO’ project at the former institution between 2021-24, where they took part in the interdisciplinary research on the earliest farming communities in the southern Balkans. They previously worked as an environmental archaeologist and post-doctoral fellow at the Koç University’s Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) in Istanbul (2018-20).
Prof Amy Bogaard
University of Oxford
Co-investigator
Prof Mike Charles
University of Oxford
Co-investigator
Dr Alexander Weide
University of Cambridge
Co-investigator