Location Central Anatolia
Years 2023-
Director
Professor Douglas Baird
University of Liverpool
Funding BIAA / IFR Global / University of Liverpool
This project applies ancient DNA analysis, micromorphology, and environmental studies of plant and animal remains to explore the transition to sedentism in central Anatolia from the Epipalaeolithic to the early Holocene.
Pınarbașı is the only confirmed Epipalaeolithic site on the Anatolian plateau, dating to 14,000–11,000 BCE. Excavations in 2022-23 uncovered an extensive Epipalaeolithic cemetery—the first of its kind in the region—and confirmed the earliest sedentary settlement in central Anatolia at 9,500 BCE. The site, which includes rock shelters and an early Holocene open settlement, offers a unique opportunity to investigate the transition to sedentary life outside the Fertile Crescent. To explore this shift, the project applies ancient DNA analysis, micromorphology, and environmental studies of plant and animal remains. These methods help clarify whether settlement continuity was affected by climatic shifts like the Younger Dryas, how early inhabitants structured their living spaces, and how burial practices reflect community organization and ancestry.
In 2023, work initiated in Mendik Tepe, a site dated to early Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) and possibly the late Epipalaeolithic, c. 10,000-9,000 BC. This period encompasses the beginning of the Holocene with its dramatic climatic amelioration, the widespread establishment of sedentary behaviours and the appearance of the earliest, so-called pre-domestication, cultivation. As part of the ‘Taştepeler’ phenomenon, most famously seen at Göbekli, this period in this area also sees the appearance of multiple large communal/public buildings that represent the world’s first corporate institutions. Predomestication cultivation has so far only been documented at a few sites in the PPNA, this may be because uptake of cultivation was a restricted phenomenon or because of lack of suitable investigation.
The development of early sedentism is extremely poorly understood. Using conceptual frameworks developed at Boncuklu, the project can explore this key change in human behaviour in alternative settings to those documented in central Anatolia and the southern Levant. The site of Mendik allows the opportunity to investigate the nature and factors involved in the appearance and nature of the corporate institutions so richly present in the Taştepeler sites.
