Spatial Approaches to the Political and Commercial Landscape of the Old Assyrian Colony Period

From the mid-20th century onwards, consolidated study of the merchant archives from the Old Assyrian trading colony at Kaneš (Kültepe) has not only transformed our understanding of the social, economic and political dynamics of the Bronze Age Near East, but also overturned many preconceived notions of what constitutes pre-modern trade. Despite this disciplinary impact and archaeological investigations at Kültepe and elsewhere, our understanding of this phenomenon has remained largely text-based and therefore of limited analytical scope, both spatially and contextually. The time is now right to reconsider it from a wider series of perspectives and this research project aims to do so via a combination of archaeological and computational approaches. The early Middle Bronze Age (Old-Assyrian colony period, ca. 1970-1700 BC) across central Anatolia and upper Mesopotamia was characterised by a network of long-distance overland exchanges. My research aims in this project are to re-assess the Old-Assyrian trade network in Upper Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia during the early Middle Bronze Age by reconsidering the archaeology of the region both on its own terms and via a range of computational approaches (including GIS and spatial statistics). My aim is to offer a sharper view of the fragmented political and economic situation in Upper Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia in the early Middle Bronze Age and evaluate how various environmental and economic factors could have affected the locations and the political and strategic importance of local city-states. Another important objective is to provide a model of the spatial distribution and the hierarchical organization of Assyrian commercial colonies in Anatolia and to reconstruct the ancient trade network in the relevant area.