Excavations in the Plain of Antioch III. stratigraphy, pottery, and small finds from chatal höyük in the amuq plain

These volumes present the final report of the four archaeological campaigns carried out by the Oriental Institute at the site of Chatal Höyük in the Amuq (currently Hatay, Turkey) under the directorship of Ian McEwan and Robert Braidwood, more than eighty years after their field operations. The excavation’s documents (daily journals, original drawings, photos, lists of objects, and letters) stored in the Oriental Institute Archives, as well as the approximately 13,000 small finds and pottery sherds from the site currently kept at the Oriental Institute Museum, provided the necessary datasets for the analysis presented here. This dataset allowed the author to reconstruct the life of a village which survived the political turmoil in the period from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age (16th–6th centuries BC). If Chatal Höyük was during the Late Bronze Age a village in the provincial part of a large empire (Hittite), it became a large independent town in a small but powerful new political entity (Walistin) during the Iron Age I and II, before being conquered by the Assyrian Empire. In this extended publication of small finds and pottery, previously unpublished materials are made available to both general readers and scholars for the first time. The material culture discussed and analyzed here offers the chance to trace changes and continuity in the site’s domestic activities, to point out shifts in cultural contacts over a long period of time, and to monitor the construction of a new community identity. It has been possible not only to better define te chronological sequence of this site, but also to address the economic and social changes that occurred in the passage from Late Bronze Age to Iron Age I and most important in the 9th century BC, (Irona Age I to Iron Age II).