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Settlement Reorganisation and the Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire: Bayesian Modelling Narrows Dates for Post-Medieval Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük, Kırşehir Province, Turkey

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Abstract

The Ottoman reoccupation of the site of Kaman-Kalehöyük (Kırşehir Province, Turkey) apparently occurred sometime during the fifteenth century CE, a time of massive territorial and administrative transformation in the Empire. A rich suite of archaeobotanical material recovered from the site offers a potentially invaluable source of information on Ottoman-era Anatolian agroeconomy, especially since historiographic research on the topic has uniformly ignored archaeological perspectives. Here we present results of a multi-proxy analysis aimed at establishing an absolute multiphasic chronology for Kaman-Kalehöyük’s Ottoman occupation, founded upon Bayesian statistical modelling of high-precision radiocarbon dates from cereal remains. We use the new chronology to position Kaman-Kalehöyük’s resettlement within a historical context, allowing a new perspective on settlement responses to large-scale Ottoman sociopolitical change in Anatolia.

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Acknowledgments

AMS 14C determinations were supported by grant ALNGRA11029 to Fairbairn (CI) and Fenwick by the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) and also by the School of Social Science, The University of Queensland. Our thanks go to Sean Ulm for encouraging more detailed analysis of Kaman-Kalehöyük’s chronology. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Science, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Q., 4072, Australia

    Rhona S. H. Fenwick & Andrew S. Fairbairn

  2. Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), PMB 1, Menai, NSW, 2234, Australia

    Quan Hua

  3. Japanese Institute of Anatolian Archæology (JIAA), 3-10-31 Osawa Mitaka-shi, Tokyo, 181-0015, Japan

    Kimiyoshi Matsumura

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  1. Rhona S. H. Fenwick
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Fenwick, R.S.H., Fairbairn, A.S., Hua, Q. et al. Settlement Reorganisation and the Rebirth of the Ottoman Empire: Bayesian Modelling Narrows Dates for Post-Medieval Occupation at Kaman-Kalehöyük, Kırşehir Province, Turkey. Int J Histor Archaeol 21, 460–484 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-016-0367-0

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