The Making of Ionia: Land-Based Interregional Interactions (15 min)

Presenters

Jana Mokrišová, University of Cambridge

Abstract

This paper examines regional mobilities and cultural dynamics on the borders of Ionia through a diachronic lens from the Early Iron Age to the early Classical period. Archaeological investigations of interactions maintained by Ionian communities usually foreground maritime rather than terrestrial connections, in no small part because of their visibility in the rich material record from Ionian sanctuaries. The historical trajectory of Ionia, which becomes Greek-speaking by the Archaic period, is often as a result artificially divorced in the scholarly literature from the developments in the Anatolian interior, including the nascence of Lydia and Phrygia, as well as those in other coastal western Anatolian regions.

This paper focuses on the regional dynamics across and beyond Ionian borders by foregrounding a land-based perspective from the northern, southern, and eastern neighbors of Aeolis, Caria, and Lydia. These areas experienced a gradual increased peopling of the landscape in the course of the first millennium B.C.E., but the concrete mechanisms of this process before the Classical period are still relatively poorly understood. This paper therefore integrates settlement patterns and pottery data from recent survey projects in three key regions—the lower Hermos (modern Gediz), upper Kaystros (modern Küçük Menderes), and lower Meander (modern Büyük Menderes) River valleys—which supply crucial information on the connectivity and interaction in riverine corridors that become borderzones between Ionian city-states and other Anatolian communities. It then considers how the long histories of mobility and connectivity on these overland routes contributed to the gradual formation of urban communities within Ionia.

  AIA-5A