Highlands of South Eastern Anatolian Landscape

an integrated methodology

Simone Bonzano 1

Introduction

The PhD project ASPE, “ Analysing Settlement Patterns of Eastern Anatolia”, 2 is focused on the diachronic settlement assessment of the highlands surrounding the Van Lake in Eastern Anatolia (fig. 1), the cradle of Urartu and ancient Armenia; aiming to improve our understanding of the relationship between local powers and the regional assessment through different ages, bringing together new cues about the history of Anatolia and Caucasus. The research addresses the local socio-political assessment of the lake area, geographical and historical core of the region, 3 making a comparison between Antiquity — 1200 and 550 BC, Early Iron Age culture and the Kingdom of Urartu on the one hand and the Middle-Ages (4th century to the 11th AD) on the other. These periods of the regional assessment have been mangled by a continuous dialectic between two processes or forces: “ feudalism”, or centrifugal force, and “ monarchic”, or centripetal force: “ feudalism”, or centrifugal force, and “ monarchic”, or centripetal force. 4 Regional political agents such as local lords, households or provincial governors acted on the landscape developing and clustering their social, political and economical functions in geographically defined areas creating friendly relationships or struggling with the regional ruling power such as the Urartu, the Armenian Kingdom or the Arab Empire. The resulting local networks became collective agents shaped by and shaping this assessment and related networks. Aiming to define these local powers, the paper presents a GIS integrated methodology contextualised on these local networks: an attempt to try a new “ network agents” interpretative approach through the use of GIS in landscape archaeology to support the whole analysis. This article is about the operative definition of this GIS application and also presents a related test of the results.

A picture of the hills

The centrality of the Van Lake district in Eastern Anatolia is implicit in its position as the main salty water-basin among its high and step mountains. Ancient and modern settlements do not spread homogeneously throughout the region; rather they spot the little plain shore of the lake and the valley bottom, giving the landscape the shape of a “ mountain archipelago”. 5