On the Move: Mobility in Southwest Anatolia and the Southeast Aegean during the Late Bronze to Early Iron Age Transition

Abstract

The end of the Late Bronze Age has long been considered a period of heightened mobility after the collapse of a number of polities, namely the Hittite Empire of central Anatolia, the Arzawan lands of western Anatolia, and the Mycenaean kingdoms of Greece. One such major population movement according to ancient historians was the so-called ‘Ionian migration’, traditionally understood as a large-scale unidirectional migratory event of Greek speakers into western Anatolia. Recent literary and historical studies, however, have suggested that these accounts represent invented traditions created centuries later after the events they purported to record. This dissertation re-evaluates the archaeological evidence for this supposed migration in the period spanning the end of the Late Bronze Age and the dawn of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200-800 BCE). More generally, it examines the connections between mobility, intercultural contact, and identity formation in southwest Anatolia (Ionia, Caria, and Lydia) with a focus on ties to the southeast Aegean. This dissertation shows that, rather than seeing a large-scale influx of new people into Anatolia at the end of the second millennium BCE, this period witnessed a more complex admixture of concomitant processes. These include more localized forms of mobility, continuing practices established before the 13th century BCE; increased interaction between communities across southwest Anatolia during the gradual process of the emergence of new Early Iron Age polities; and a slow conceptual shift from more open-ended notions of communal identity in the earlier periods to the establishment of more sharply defined and oppositional identities (e.g., between Greek and non-Greek) by the end of the Early Iron Age. Mobility had been a fact of life for the communities of the Anatolian littoral for centuries. Rather than a large-scale migration, it was this protracted low-intensity movement of smaller social groups that enabled southwest Anatolian communities to form and maintain close contacts across both local and regional economic and social networks, combining existing local networks with those of the incoming individuals.