Archaeology and Urban Settlement in Late Roman and Byzantine Anatolia

Abstract

It is time to review what we have learned from the AAP and our survey work so far. Euchaïta presents a valuable example of a provincial urban settlement which evolved and changed as its political, economic and strategic role shift ed across many centuries. As was noted in the Introduction, its importance lies especially in the fact that we can follow its development, even if tenuously at times, from village , to town or 'city' , to military base and back to village again across the period from the fourth to the sixteenth century, a fact that makes it unique in the history of Anatolia. We are especially privileged in this respect because we possess both written sources and texts of various types, including epigraphic material, as well as the results of the area survey, whose results this volume presents. Although the written material is limited, it is nevertheless a good deal more than can be said for many settlements of Anatolia. In addition, we have also the preliminary results of a more detailed archaeological investigation of parts of the settlement and the fortifi ed installation behind it, of the archaeology and environmental history of its district, and of the ceramic evidence which helps us to situate Euchaïta in a wider context. In the following, we will examine the historical and archaeological evidence we have now assembled through the survey for the history of Euchaïta from its fi rst appearance in the written record, in the fourth century CE until its eff ective disappearance as a settlement of any importance aft er the Seljuk and Turkmen occupation of the area in the 1070s, and its reappearance in Ottoman fi scal documents as a small and unpretentious rural settlement.Th e village of Avkat/ Beyözü today consists of just over 320 households, with a highly seasonal habitation pattern. During the period of the survey only c. 130 people were in residence, with some 40 living much of the time in Çorum , some 40 km distant, 20 in Mecitözü , 6 km distant, over 80 in Istanbul , some 7 in Ankara , 7 in Izmir and 20 in western Europe. Many members of the younger generation work in either Ankara or Istanbul across the summer , but are present for key agricultural activities, notably sowing and harvesting periods as well as the annual sale of produce to government agencies. Several other families have members working abroad -Holland seemed the most frequently mentioned, and two at least among