Books by Peri Johnson
This dissertation presents a critical study of the landscapes of Achaemenid-period Paphlagonia (c... more This dissertation presents a critical study of the landscapes of Achaemenid-period Paphlagonia (c. 550-330 BCE), a mountainous region in northern central Turkey that extends from the verdant Black Sea coast to the sparser Anatolian plateau. In the classical literary sources and the imperial narratives of the Achaemenid Empire, the region of Paphlagonia has been characterized as a mountainous frontier, inhabited by migrants and ruled by gluttonous dynasts. Classically-informed historians writing about the Achaemenid period also speak of Paphlagonia as a bounded region, divided into several rival chiefdoms. Recent archaeological surveys and excavations in the region, however, present a different perspective: a complex and contested landscape politically and culturally related to the Black Sea and Anatolia, as well as the wider Aegean and Achaemenid worlds. A series of ubiquitous, columnar rockcut tombs spread across the Paphlagonian landscape function as significant monuments where such hybrid identities and political alignments are negotiated.
The dissertation develops a post-colonial critique of the ancient and modern discourses that reimagine Paphlagonia and Paphlagonians as marginal, uncivilized, and tribal. It traces the genealogy of how the region of Paphlagonia within classical geography came about in the work of 19th and 20th century colonial antiquarians, geographers, and archaeologists; and demonstrates the modernist and nationalist underpinnings of their writings. Furthermore, the dissertation brings together data from recent archaeological surveys and excavations in the region to provide a fuller picture of the various landscapes of Paphlagonia, with special emphasis on the relationship of rockcut funerary monuments and settlement to copper mining, karst landscapes, and forest ecologies. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates a critical methodology of an archaeology of landscapes by deconstructing ancient and modern discourses about them and creating a new analytical framework, using a combination of archaeological survey, archival research, and critical perspectives.
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Book Chapters by Peri Johnson
Landscape dynamics and settlement patterns in Northern Anatolia during the Roman and Byzantine period, 2015
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Pompeiopolis I; eine Zwischenbilanz aus der Metropole Paphlagoniens nach fünf Kampagnen (2006-2010), 2011
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Articles by Peri Johnson
Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies, 2022
Th is article layers material, physical, and textual landscapes of the Hittite Empire in a compac... more Th is article layers material, physical, and textual landscapes of the Hittite Empire in a compact borderland region. We argue that a real strength of landscape archaeology is in understanding and articulating medium-scale landscapes through archaeological survey methods and critical study of physical geography. Medium-scale landscapes are a milieu of daily human experience, movement, and visuality that spawn a densely textured countryside involving settlements, sacred places, quarries, roads, transhumance routes, and water infrastructures. Using the data and the experience from eight fi eld seasons by the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project team since 2010, we off er accounts of three specifi c landscapes: the Ilgın Plain, the Bulasan River valley near the Hittite fortress of Kale Tepesi, and the pastoral uplands of Yalburt Yaylası. For each, we demonstrate diff erent sets of relationships and landscape dynamics during the Late Bronze Age, with specifi c emphasis on movement, settlement, taskscapes, land use, and human experience
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The archaeology of Anatolia, vol. 4; recent discoveries (2018–2020), 2021
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The Archaeology of Anatolia Volume III, 2019
The route through the Ilgın Plain is also understood to be a prominent one in the Anatolian excha... more The route through the Ilgın Plain is also understood to be a prominent one in the Anatolian exchange network during antiquity and afterwards. During the early Middle Bronze Age, the so-called Assyrian trading colony period in Anatolia, the major east–west route carrying the silver trade presumably went through the region, and it has been proposed that the port of trade for silver, Purušḫanda, must have been located somewhere along the Ilgın - Akşehir - Afyon axis. According to Strabo, Tyriaion (the Hellenistic/Roman urban settlement under Ilgın) is on the Hellenistic “common road” from Ephesus to the Euphrates. Moreover, it is known that the last Seljuk vizier, Sahip Ata, built a caravanserai in Ilgın to support trade. The study of interregional road infrastructures, largely derived from such anecdotal archival evidence, is helpful to some extent in understanding the connections between regional and local networks. However, investigating the complex local and microregional roads and routes requires a different methodology entirely, one that combines archaeological surface survey, geomorphology, and a long-term, deeply historical understanding of settlement histories. During the 2018 field season, the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project foregrounded the question of roads and routes in the Ilgın Plain and in the wider survey area using the archaeological surface evidence for settlement and geomorphology. In this chapter we outline the preliminary results of the research.
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The Archaeology of Anatolia: Recent Descoveries (2015-2016) Volume II, 2017
Landscape archaeologists are well equipped to investigate long-term structural changes in settlem... more Landscape archaeologists are well equipped to investigate long-term structural changes in settlement landscapes, especially through their collaborations with geomorphologists and paleo-environmental scientists. In the last several decades, landscape projects around the world have gradually built an extensive record of human-environment relationships in the Holocene, which started 11,700 years ago with the beginnings of agriculture and settled life. In the age of the Anthropocene, the proposed new geological epoch to follow the Holocene, survey archaeologists increasingly find themselves working in ruined postindustrial landscapes, salvage operations that are dictated by development projects, sites of mining and incommensurable extraction, and the margins of military conflict. These are the landscapes of the Anthropocene, torn apart from the traditionally idealized and pristine landscapes of the Holocene.
Landscapes of the Anthropocene are the lithosphere’s asphalt and concrete layers, sites of mining, extreme extraction, industrial-scale intervention, and chemical contamination; and second, the atmosphere’s global warming gases made from what has been excavated from the earth (fossil fuels like coal). A thirty-three square km open pit lignite mine and power plant are planned for the cultivated fields and pastoral foothills of the Çavuşçu-Kurugöl lake basin that lies within the survey area of the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project in the Ilgın district of Konya province. This proposed sacrificial landscape is a part of the Anthropocene’s lithosphere and atmosphere. In this article, we present a third affected sphere by undertaking a comparison of the hydrosphere of Holocene (Bronze Age) and Anthropocene (contemporary/postindustrial) landscapes, focusing particularly on the dramatic changes in the hydrosphere that have made the agricultural landscapes of Ilgın disposable, thus laying the groundwork for making the lignite mine an acceptable future for the region.
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The Archaeology of Anatolia: Current Work (2013-2014). Sharon Steadman and Gregory McMahon (eds.). Cambridge Scholars Press, 259-281., Sep 2015
The Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Project is a diachronic regional survey in central w... more The Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Project is a diachronic regional survey in central western Turkey, covering an area in the northwest of Konya Province in the district of Ilgın, with some spillover into the districts of Kadınhanı and Yunak. The survey project was initiated in 2010 in the landscapes around two well-known Hittite (Late Bronze Age) imperial monuments with hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions (Fig. 12-1). Both monuments were built in the southwestern borderlands of the Hittite Empire: the Yalburt Yaylası sacred mountain spring monument of Tudḫaliya IV (1237-1209 BCE) and the Köylütolu Yayla earthen dam. This paper summarizes the preliminary results of the survey between 2010 and 2014.
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Harmanşah, Ömür and Peri Johnson; 2016. “Hittites on the Way to the Mediterranean: Yalburt Yaylas... more Harmanşah, Ömür and Peri Johnson; 2016. “Hittites on the Way to the Mediterranean: Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Project 2015 Campaign - Akdeniz’e Doğru Hititler: Yalburt Yaylası Arkeolojik Yüzey Araştırma Projesi 2015 Sezonu” ANMED News of Archaeology from ANATOLIA’S MEDITERRANEAN AREAS 2016-14: 296-300.
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31. Araştırma Sonuçları Toplantısı
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To the north of the Ilgın Plain and on the southern slopes of the Gavurdağ-Karadağ massif lies Ya... more To the north of the Ilgın Plain and on the southern slopes of the Gavurdağ-Karadağ massif lies Yalburt, a summer pasture settlement (a yayla) belonging to the village of Şuhut/ Çobankaya. As the story is told by the residents of Yalburt, immediately uphill from the yayla used to be a well known as Kocakuyu that had the sweetest and the coldest waters in the area. No matter how much you drew from it, its water was never lessened.
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Arkeoloji Aktüel 37, Mar 2014
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30. Araştırma Sonuçları Toplantısı Bildirileri., May 2013
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Field Reports by Peri Johnson
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Books by Peri Johnson
The dissertation develops a post-colonial critique of the ancient and modern discourses that reimagine Paphlagonia and Paphlagonians as marginal, uncivilized, and tribal. It traces the genealogy of how the region of Paphlagonia within classical geography came about in the work of 19th and 20th century colonial antiquarians, geographers, and archaeologists; and demonstrates the modernist and nationalist underpinnings of their writings. Furthermore, the dissertation brings together data from recent archaeological surveys and excavations in the region to provide a fuller picture of the various landscapes of Paphlagonia, with special emphasis on the relationship of rockcut funerary monuments and settlement to copper mining, karst landscapes, and forest ecologies. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates a critical methodology of an archaeology of landscapes by deconstructing ancient and modern discourses about them and creating a new analytical framework, using a combination of archaeological survey, archival research, and critical perspectives.
Book Chapters by Peri Johnson
Articles by Peri Johnson
Landscapes of the Anthropocene are the lithosphere’s asphalt and concrete layers, sites of mining, extreme extraction, industrial-scale intervention, and chemical contamination; and second, the atmosphere’s global warming gases made from what has been excavated from the earth (fossil fuels like coal). A thirty-three square km open pit lignite mine and power plant are planned for the cultivated fields and pastoral foothills of the Çavuşçu-Kurugöl lake basin that lies within the survey area of the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project in the Ilgın district of Konya province. This proposed sacrificial landscape is a part of the Anthropocene’s lithosphere and atmosphere. In this article, we present a third affected sphere by undertaking a comparison of the hydrosphere of Holocene (Bronze Age) and Anthropocene (contemporary/postindustrial) landscapes, focusing particularly on the dramatic changes in the hydrosphere that have made the agricultural landscapes of Ilgın disposable, thus laying the groundwork for making the lignite mine an acceptable future for the region.
Field Reports by Peri Johnson
The dissertation develops a post-colonial critique of the ancient and modern discourses that reimagine Paphlagonia and Paphlagonians as marginal, uncivilized, and tribal. It traces the genealogy of how the region of Paphlagonia within classical geography came about in the work of 19th and 20th century colonial antiquarians, geographers, and archaeologists; and demonstrates the modernist and nationalist underpinnings of their writings. Furthermore, the dissertation brings together data from recent archaeological surveys and excavations in the region to provide a fuller picture of the various landscapes of Paphlagonia, with special emphasis on the relationship of rockcut funerary monuments and settlement to copper mining, karst landscapes, and forest ecologies. Finally, the dissertation demonstrates a critical methodology of an archaeology of landscapes by deconstructing ancient and modern discourses about them and creating a new analytical framework, using a combination of archaeological survey, archival research, and critical perspectives.
Landscapes of the Anthropocene are the lithosphere’s asphalt and concrete layers, sites of mining, extreme extraction, industrial-scale intervention, and chemical contamination; and second, the atmosphere’s global warming gases made from what has been excavated from the earth (fossil fuels like coal). A thirty-three square km open pit lignite mine and power plant are planned for the cultivated fields and pastoral foothills of the Çavuşçu-Kurugöl lake basin that lies within the survey area of the Yalburt Yaylası Archaeological Landscape Research Project in the Ilgın district of Konya province. This proposed sacrificial landscape is a part of the Anthropocene’s lithosphere and atmosphere. In this article, we present a third affected sphere by undertaking a comparison of the hydrosphere of Holocene (Bronze Age) and Anthropocene (contemporary/postindustrial) landscapes, focusing particularly on the dramatic changes in the hydrosphere that have made the agricultural landscapes of Ilgın disposable, thus laying the groundwork for making the lignite mine an acceptable future for the region.
Academic perspectives on ancient communities of the mountains tend to associate them with “landscapes of terror” (e.g., Matthews 2004). In these scenarios, marginalized mountain peoples are presented either as “tribal” threats to urbanized elites of the prosperous plains and lowland and river valleys, or impediments to regional circulation (Horden and Purcell 2000: 80). Such perspectives are produced under the influence of urban archives; they are typical of uncritical characterizations of mountains from an elitist bias and have to be taken with a grain of salt. Archaeological survey evidence, strengthened by ethnohistorical research, presents a far more even-handed perspective on life in the mountains. In this chapter we point to the intimately entangled nature of lowlands and mountains in the local context of west central Anatolia. This chapter is a modest attempt to bring back mountains as complex and connected landscapes of alterity and to invite mountains back to their place within settlement history.
Bu makalede öncelikle 2015 sezonunda yapılan çalışmaları öncelikle kısaca özetlenecektir. Makalenin ikinci kısmında ise Müge Durusu-Tanrıöver’in Ocak 2016’da tamamladığı “Hitit İmparatorluğu’nu Sınırboylarında Deneyimlemek” başlıklı doktora tezinin Yalburt Projesi kapsamındaki sonuçlarına değinilecektir.