Evaluating Agricultural Strategies in Ancient Anatolia

“Risk, sustainability, and decision making: evaluating agricultural strategies in ancient Anatolia”
Identifying how ancient societies made decisions regarding agricultural land use is important for understanding why some pre-industrial agricultural systems flourished and others collapsed. Local environmental and cultural factors influence how people balance goals of short-term profitability and long-term sustainability in agricultural decision making. The ancient city of Gordion, in central Turkey, offers rich paleoethnobotanical, zooarchaeological, and phytogeographic evidence for coincident changes in landscape and agricultural practices over a period of 2500 years. Marston argues that climate change and shifts in political and economic networks led inhabitants of Gordion to utilize different land-use strategies over time, which had broad implications for the long-term sustainability of agriculture in the region.

John Marston is a PhD candidate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA.

jwil 12.v.2010