Seminar in Liverpool

Revisiting the Central/Western Anatolian Farming Frontier

In 2016, a workshop was held at the 10ICAANE Conference in Vienna, which brought together researchers working on the Neolithic of Central and Western Anatolia, where research has traditionally proceeded in isolation. The question raised then was, why did farming start in Central Anatolia almost 2,000 calibrated years earlier than it did in Western Anatolia and the Aegean Basin – as a review of c. 1,000 radiocarbon dates from over 50 sites indicated at the time? Does this lag reflect an actual frontier, where farming expansion was halted, or is the observed pattern somehow biased by different research strategies and/or geomorphological processes affecting site recovery in Western Anatolia? In this seminar, I would like to revisit the Central/Western Anatolian Farming Frontier, in light of the contributions to the 2016 workshop and recent publications, particularly from the field of ancient DNA research.