Abstract
The extensively excavated areas of domestic architecture at the late Early Bronze Age urban settlement of Titriş Höyük in southeast Turkey provide us with a rare opportunity to study the distribution of crops and their processing by-products between different households, as well as to assess differences in indoor and outdoor activities, with the potential of identifying patterns of spatial organisation in the processing and storing of crops, and the preparation of food. The Outer Town area of Titriş Höyük was substantially reorganized in the late EBA, possibly to make room for victims of regional political conflicts. The similarity in the range of agricultural products found in the households, matching the regularity of the centrally planned houses, indicates that not only the rehousing of the new occupants of Outer Town, but also their supply of agricultural products, may have been organized and provided by a central power in the city. A model for the identification of the consumer end of centrally organized food distribution is suggested.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Tim Matney, Guillermo Algaze and Adam Allentuck for providing me with archaeobotanical material and archaeological data from Titriş Höyük. I would also like to thank Peter Steen Henriksen, Murat Arslan, Carlo Colantoni and two anonymous reviewers for many useful comments on various aspects of this study. The analysis of the Titriş Höyük archaeobotanical material and the preparation of this paper were made possible through the generous funding by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities.
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Communicated by G. Willcox.
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Hald, M.M. Distribution of crops at late Early Bronze Age Titriş Höyük, southeast Anatolia: towards a model for the identification of consumers of centrally organised food distribution. Veget Hist Archaeobot 19, 69–77 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-009-0223-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-009-0223-9