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<< Our Photo Pages >> Asikli Hoyuk - Ancient Village or Settlement in Turkey

Submitted by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 19 November 2014  Page Views: 20480

DigsSite Name: Asikli Hoyuk Alternative Name: Aşıklı Höyük
Country: Turkey Type: Ancient Village or Settlement
Nearest Town: Aksaray  Nearest Village: Kızılkaya
Latitude: 38.349600N  Longitude: 34.230000E
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
2 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
5 Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
4 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
5

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Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : A 10,000 year old settlement in a lovely position. Older even than Çatalhöyük. (Vote or comment on this photo)
A 10,000 year old Neolithic settlement lying in the volcanic landscape of Cappadocia, on the bank of the Melendiz river. For at least twenty generations people of Aşıklı lived in mud brick houses.

The houses had hearths and burial pits beneath the floors; in rare cases they had bins and benches. Middens and special function buildings were communal. Besides practising farming they made extensive use of wild plants and animals. (From the site information board).

See also the research project's web site (in Turkish).
And the Flickr stream.

Note: Older even than Çatalhöyük, archaeologists estimate there is another 25 years of work at this exciting site - see the latest comment on our page
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Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by Andy B : The obsidian bracelet from Aşıklı Höyük. Left: Digital reconstruction of the bracelet proposed by Mohamed Ben Tkaya (LTDS) Right: a. Shape and dimensions, b. Symmetry of the object. © Obsidian Use Project Archives. (1 comment - Vote or comment on this photo)

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : A hearth in one of the houses. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : It's in a nice setting, next to the river. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : Mount Hasan (Hasan Dağı) seen from Aşıklı Höyük. This volcano appears in the famous neolithic fresco from Çatalhöyük. (Vote or comment on this photo)

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : The focus of excavations has moved to the south side of the mound with a new structure over it. Mount Hasan (Hasan Dağı) in the distance.

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : Building T. One of the Special Purpose Buildings of the Aşıklı community where rituals and ceremonies were performed. Middle 8th millennium BCE.

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : Space HV. A large building with an open court-like space in the middle. This was a ritual and ceremonial area, the floor of which had been renewed at least 300 times.

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : Experimental houses from the 9th millennium BCE.

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : There is now a structure over the excavations on the southern side of the mound.

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : 8th millennium BCE replica houses at Aşıklı Höyük. (1 comment)

Asikli Hoyuk
Asikli Hoyuk submitted by davidmorgan : The information board.

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Nearby sites listing. In the following links * = Image available
 381m SW 230° Musular Ancient Village or Settlement
 20.6km W 273° Aksaray Museum* Museum
 25.9km SE 128° Divarli Hoyuk* Ancient Village or Settlement
 27.0km NE 54° Topada* Carving
 29.4km NNE 12° Ovaören Mound* Ancient Village or Settlement
 29.7km ESE 109° Golludag* Ancient Village or Settlement
 29.8km N 10° Topak Hoyuk* Ancient Village or Settlement
 30.3km SE 130° Tepecik Çiftlik* Ancient Village or Settlement
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 44.1km E 86° Derinkuyu Underground City* Ancient Village or Settlement
 47.1km ENE 75° Kaymakli Underground City* Ancient Village or Settlement
 47.7km SSE 164° Kinik Hoyuk* Ancient Village or Settlement
 51.8km NE 54° Nevsehir Underground City* Cave or Rock Shelter
 55.7km NE 38° Arapsun* Ancient Village or Settlement
 57.9km SE 137° Nahita Ancient Village or Settlement
 62.1km NNE 18° Karaburna* Carving
 64.3km ENE 57° Rock Cones of Urgup (Cappadocia)* Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
 65.0km SSE 149° Kösk Höyük* Ancient Village or Settlement
 65.4km ENE 79° Sobessos* Ancient Village or Settlement
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 76.4km S 180° Eregli Kara Hoyuk Ancient Village or Settlement
 84.5km SE 135° Kestel Ancient Mine, Quarry or other Industry
 89.1km N 356° Kirsehir Museum Museum
 89.6km NE 35° Topakli Hoyuk Ancient Village or Settlement
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Aşıklı, the first village of Cappadocia by davidmorgan on Monday, 17 August 2015
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The Aşıklı Mound, where settlement first started in the Cappadocia region 11,000 years ago, offers a chance to travel back in time. Archaeological excavations have been continuing for 26 years in the mound, located in Kızılkaya village in the central Anatolian province of Aksaray’s Gülağaç district.

The head of the excavations, Professor Mihriban Özbaşaran, said this year’s work started in July.

She said people who had previously settled near various places rich in plants and fruits started settling in Aşıklı Mound 10,500 years ago, adding the mound was Cappadocia’s first and oldest settlement.

Özbaşaran said the Aşıklı people chose the coast of the Melendiz River for a permanent settlement and lived there for 1,000 years. “As a research team, we have worked on how the people of Aşıklı struggled against difficulties during this process, how they survived as a crowded mass of people, what kind of social rules they created as well as their economy and technology,” she said.

Özbaşaran said they had obtained well-protected data about the new lifestyle of the Aşıklı people, and continued:

“When the group first came here, they lived in round structures buried underground. We see that these structures came to the surface through time, became a square shape, and their walls were made of adobe blocks. We can observe the whole development of architecture in Aşıklı Mound. One of the firsts in Aşıklı was agricultural trials. Small-scaled agriculture grew in time enough to feed the whole group. We understand it from the large storages in the excavation area. They also domesticated animals. They first took animals under control. In the same way, they processed copper. We know that the oldest copper technology was in Aşıklı in central Anatolia.”

Özbaşaran said another first in Aşıklı was a skull, which is currently on display at the Aksaray Museum.

“A hole made with obsidian stone in the skull is considered the world’s oldest brain operation. It was the skull of a nearly 25-year-old woman, and after the operation she lived for about 10 days. Therefore we can call it an ‘operation.’”

The first village of Cappadocia is open to tourism, said Özbaşaran, adding they were working with an international team in Aşıklı Mound and had applied experimental archaeology method.

The professor said using experimental methods they had created the same architecture of Aşıklı at the entrance of the mound.

“Here our goal is to find answers to our scientific questions and create a display area for visitors. Even in the winter season, when you come to Aşıklı, you have a chance to see the exact copies of what we have found there. You can enter the houses and see what they ate, how they lit a fire and how they plastered their walls. Tourists may travel in time to 11,000 years ago to see the history of Aşıklı.”

Source: Hürriyet
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Cappadocia’s 11,000-year-old settlement thrills experts by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 12 November 2014
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After 25 years of excavations, Aşıklı Höyük continues to thrill archaeologists, who believe the number of things left to discover at the site would allow for at least another 25 years of work or more.

Professor Mihriban Özbaşaran from İstanbul University, the current head of the excavation and research project at Aşıklı Höyük, was a doctorate student when excavations at the site in the Cappadocia region of Central Anatolia began in 1989.

Her enthusiasm about Aşıklı Höyük appears to still be very strong, even after 25 years at the site, as the pleasure she takes from accompanying and briefing a group of journalists is very discernible. She hopes their visit will shine a spotlight on Aşıklı Höyük, which has been overshadowed by the popularity of archaeological sites such as Göbeklitepe and Çatalhöyük. Yet with its inhabited history dating back to 9000 B.C., Aşıklı Höyük is 1,000 years older than the Çatalhöyük settlement on the Konya plain and as the earliest village settlement founded in the Cappadocia region, the site is no less important.

Excavation studies undertaken at the site have yielded crucial conclusions about the history of the region. Aşıklı Höyük’s importance stems from findings that shed further light on the transition by humans in the region from a nomadic to a sedentary lifestyle, according to Özbaşaran.

Nomadic communities, who survived by consuming what was available in nature by hunting and gathering, began to settle down in permanent villages and produce their own goods. “Before, they were in small groups on the move. Here is the first time they started to be together for 24 hours as a community,” she said.

In Turkey, Southeast Anatolia is where the first developments related to this transition took place. “What excites me the most about the site is that before the excavation studies started at Aşıklı it was thought that these developments have diffused from East to West,” Özbaşaran said.

Studies at Aşıklı show that this lifestyle transition happened independently in the Central Anatolia region, and developments specific to local communities, such as animal domestication and construction technologies, occurred as a result of interaction with neighboring communities, she added.

The site welcomes visitors with replica houses. They are one-to-one scale replicas of their originals in terms of size, direction and plan. In terms of history of architecture, Aşıklı Höyük provides the earliest examples of the traditional mud-brick architecture of Anatolia and how these structures developed through time can be traced. The first inhabitants of Aşıklı built semi-subterranean oval-shaped huts.

Over time these huts were replaced by rectangular-shaped mud-brick buildings, and people began to live in clusters of buildings adjacent to each other, forming different neighborhoods. Streets separating the buildings are observable to visitors, as the site is designed as an open air museum or archaeological park.

Aşıklı Höyük harbors many firsts. It is the first settlement on the Central Anatolian Plateau where copper was mined. It was also the site where the earliest-known brain surgery and first autopsy were performed, as the skulls of two individuals recovered from the site provide crucial information about the history of medicine.

Read more, with photos at: Hürriyet
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Excavations reveal daily life of 10,000 years ago by davidmorgan on Friday, 26 October 2012
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Excavations in Aşıklıhöyük have reached the bottom layer, revealing information about the first settled life that began there 10,300 years ago. The more than 80 skeletons found in the area show the approximate average lifespan of the people living there then was between 25 and 30 years.

The head of the Aşıklıhöyük excavation, Professor Mihriban Özbaşaran, said the area was the earliest-known village settlement in the Central Anatolia and Cappadocia region. Archaeological work in the area began in 1989, and has obtained a great deal of important data that sheds light on both world and Anatolian history. “With a history of 10,300 years, Aşıklıhöyük was the first village in Cappadocia and also a place that led many technological and scientific developments in the world, such as the first agricultural activities and the first brain surgery,” Özbaşaran said.

The 2012 excavation season at Aşıklıhöyük is almost over, she said, adding that this year workers at the site had examined the lifestyle of the people of the area’s first settlement, working on the site’s bottom layer, after digging down for 23 years. “This year we tried to understand the lifestyle of the people who arrived in the region first. We started working in this field in 1989, and over time found that these people had lived in oval-shaped brick houses that were halfway underground. We unearthed three houses in the area this year. There were also large open spaces in the area, and we worked on those in order to understand the daily activities of the people. Among those activities were leather processing and animal slaughter, both of which took place in the open areas.”

Most of the skeletons found in graves at Aşıklıhöyük belong to women and children, Özbaşaran said. “It is interesting that there was a high number of deaths among children and women. Probably many deaths occurred during birth. Epidemic diseases were also prevalent. We determined that the average age of death was between 25 and 30 in Aşıklıhöyük, which is very young. A man who died between the ages of 45 and 50 had one of the longest lives.”

This year a skeleton was unearthed that had been buried in a nontraditional way, Özbaşaran said. “The dead were usually buried under the houses in the fetal position. But we found a child of six or eight years lying in a furnace, which was very different from the other 80 skeletons we have found. We are investigating whether the child died accidentally. Reports from physical anthropologists will reveal the correct answer.”

Human life at Aşıklıhöyük continued for 800 years, Özbaşaran said. Her team will continue its work excavating the area next year.

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/excavations-reveal-daily-life-of-10000-years-ago.aspx?pageID=238&nID=30504&NewsCatID=375
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Obsidian, Trade and Society in the Central Anatolian Neolithic by davidmorgan on Monday, 20 February 2012
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Fevzi Volkan Güngördü's 2010 master's thesis from the Department of Archaeology, Bilkent University, Ankara:

Obsidian, Trade and Society in the Central Anatolian Neolithic.
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Obsidian bracelet reveals amazing craft skill from the eighth millennium BC by Andy B on Monday, 02 January 2012
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Researchers from the Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul and the Laboratoire de Tribologie et de Dynamiques des Systèmes from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon and Ecole Nationale d'Ingénieurs in Saint Etienne have analyzed the oldest obsidian bracelet ever identified, which was discovered in 1995 at the site of Aşıklı Höyük in Turkey.

Obsidian is a silica-rich volcanic glass which can be of many different colors - grey, dark green, red, black, and which has brittle mechanical properties. Using high-tech methods developed by LTDS to study the bracelet's surface and its micro-topographic features, the researchers have revealed the astounding technical expertise of craftsmen in the eighth millennium BC. Their skills were highly sophisticated for this period in late prehistory, and on a par with today's polishing techniques. This work is published in the December 2011 issue of Journal of Archaeological Science, and sheds new light on Neolithic societies, which remain highly mysterious.

Dated to 7500 BC, the obsidian bracelet studied by the researchers is unique. It is the earliest evidence of obsidian working, which only reached its peak in the seventh and sixth millennia BC with the production of all kinds of ornamental objects, including mirrors and vessels. It has a complex shape and a remarkable central annular ridge, and is 10 cm in diameter and 3.3 cm wide. Discovered in 1995 at the exceptional site of Asıklı Höyük in Turkey and displayed ever since at the Aksaray Archeological Museum, the ring was studied in 2009, after Mihriban Özbasaran, Professor at the University of Istanbul's Department of Prehistory, resumed excavations.

Laurence Astruc, a CNRS researcher at the Institut Français d'Etudes Anatoliennes in Istanbul and her colleagues analyzed the bracelet using extremely powerful computer technologies developed by LTDS researchers Hassan Zahouani (ENISE) and Roberto Vargiolu (ECL).

Developed for industry in order to characterize the 'orange peel effect' on painted car bodywork, these methods, known as multi-scale tribological analysis, have been adapted for the study of micro-topographic features on archeological artefacts. They seek to identify every single operation performed on the surface of these objects.

This process has revealed that the bracelet was made using highly specialized manufacturing techniques. The analyses carried out showed that the bracelet was almost perfectly regular. The symmetry of the central annular ridge is extremely precise, to the nearest degree and nearest hundred micrometers.

This suggests that the artisans of the time used models to control its shape when it was being made. The surface finish of the bracelet (which is very regular, resembling a mirror) required the use of complex polishing techniques capable of obtaining a nanometer-scale surface quality worthy of today's telescope lenses.

Led by Laurence Astruc, the work was carried out in collaboration with the University of Istanbul and was funded by France's National Research Agency as part of the 'Obsidian: Practical Techniques and Uses in Anatolia' program (ANR 08-Blanc-0318). In the program, the Asıklı Höyük bracelet is the first object to have been studied among some sixty other polished obsidian artefacts.

In collaboration with the University of Manchester and the British Museum, Laurence Astruc's team is now analyzing ornamental objects found at the Halaf sites of Domuztepe in Eastern Central Anatolia and Arpachiyyah in Iraq.

References:

Astruc L., Vargiolu R., Ben Tkaya M., Balkan-Atlı N., Özbaşaran M., Zahouani H., Multi-scale tribological analysis of the technique of manufacture of an obsidian bracelet from Aşıklı Höyük (Aceramic Neolithic, Central Anatolia), Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011): 3415-3424.

Source: CNRS, with thanks to jackdaw1 for the link
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    Re: Obsidian bracelet reveals amazing craft skill from the eighth millennium BC by davidmorgan on Tuesday, 03 January 2012
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    I wonder if they've been coordinating with the Numazu National College of Technology in Japan who have done a survey of obsidian sources in that region. Maybe their techniques could pinpoint the exact source of the obsidian for this bracelet.
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Re: Aşıklı Höyük by davidmorgan on Wednesday, 22 October 2008
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On YouTube.
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