Preliminary Archaeobotanical Results from Early Bronze Age III Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük

By the end of the Early Bronze Age (EBA III) large, socially stratified urban settlements had appeared in central Anatolia linked into regional trade networks, including connections to Mesopotamia, in which lie the origins of the Assyrian trading system that dominates our knowledge of the earlier Middle Bronze Age (MBA I-III). Archaeobotanical knowledge of the EBA plant economy in central Anatolia is extremely limited with only a few seed samples published from Çadır (Chernoff et al. 1996), Kültepe (Fairbairn 2014) and Kaman-Kalehöyük (Fairbairn 2003; 2004) for this period. While scant, these accounts demonstrate the presence of grain-focused plant economies with evidence for probable irrigation practices and trade in some plant commodities (e.g. Fairbairn 2014). Palaeoenvironmental knowledge of the region during this period is equally sparse; few regional pollen profiles exist that are capable of illuminating the character and impact of humans on the woodlands, steppe and rivers of the region. Given the existence of a suite of evidence from Kaman-Kalehöyük spanning from the MBA to LIA, analysis of the EBA-III samples provides us with the potential to evaluate the following: 1. Was a similar range of crop species exploited in the EBA III to the MBA and beyond, or was there greater reliance on glume wheat species like emmer and einkorn in the EBA, as seen at Kültepe? 2. Was a similar range of tree species exploited in the EBA III as in later periods? 3. Does the carbon stable isotope data indicate that the EBA III was drier than the modern records indicate and does the data match that indicated for the EBA in the broader region? Concomitantly, is there evidence for irrigation?