Part of the Fall 2018 Middle Eastern and North African Studies Colloquium Series

In collaboration with the Archaeological Institute of America's International Archaeology Day 2018

Aşıklı Höyük is the earliest pre-ceramic Neolithic village site in Central Anatolia, Turkey. Its basal cultural layers were founded in the wake of the Younger Dryas and begin around 8350 cal BC. The occupations begin with round-house architecture, followed in just a few centuries by the development of rectangular densely packed buildings. Sites of this age with good preservation are extremely rare in the Middle East, and Aşıklı Höyük preserves clear evidence of the very beginnings of farming and herding. One of the key questions of collaborative archaeological research at this site is the early process of sheep and goad domestication, and its many socioeconomic ramifications. Our approach integrates zooarchaeological, geoarchaeological, istopic, botanical and radiocarbon dating methods to learn about the ecological and social substrates from which village economies arose directly from a hunter-gatherer heritage.