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Çadir
Höyük
The
2005 Excavation Season
The
Hittite City of Zippalanda:
Religion, Social Complexity, and State
Development in Hittite Anatolia
The Excavations at Cadir Hoyuk, Yozgat,
Sorgun, 2005
by
Dr. Ronald GORNY, Dr. Sam PALEY, and Dr.
Sharon STEADMAN
The joint excavation of the Alishar Research Project worked for
five weeks from mid July to mid- August
2005 at Çadır Höyük
in the Egri öz Valley, part of the
Kanak Su Basin, next to the village of
Peyniryemez, under the general direction
of Dr. Ronald Gorny of the University
of Chicago.
Dr. Sharon Steadman (SUNY Cortland),
Dr. Samuel Paley (The University at Buffalo,
SUNY), and Dr. Gregory McMahon (University
of New Hampshire) were the senior staff. Students and junior staff members from
the United States and Canada participated. The excavation was supported with a grant from The Chancellor
of the State University of New York, SUNY
College at Cortland, Hood College and
private donors, including many from the
New York Turkish community.
18 archaeologists including students came from the United States
and Canada.
They were joined by our Turkish
staff in Peyniryemez Köyü and
the representative from the Ministry of
Culture and Tourism, Ismail Sarıpınar. !8 residents of Peyniryemez Köyü were hired as workers.
The large staff and the workers
allowed us to expand the excavation and
work in 5 separate areas of the site.
Since, as a result of previous
excavation seasons, we have become very
interested in the Hittite remains in this
part of Anatolia, much of our effort was
expended working in places that we thought
might give us the best results. Excavation is a long process and sometimes
requires several seasons of work to achieve
even small objectives.
But this year was especially rewarding.
Is Çadır Höyük ,
Hittite Zippalanda? What is Cadir’s Role in the Second Millennium B.C.
The discovery during our previous excavations that Çadır
Höyük was an important Hittite
site in the Second Millennium BC called
for a reexamination of the current ideas
concerning history and geography in the
Kanak Su Basin. The possibility that Çadır
Hyük could be associated with the
Hittite cult center of Zippalanda opened
up new possibilities for understanding
the rise of complex society in the region.
On the other hand, it also raised many
new questions: Why
does Çadır(Zippalanda) have
important Old Assyrian period and Old
Hittite remains and what does this mean
in regards to our ideas concerning empire
and state formation in central Turkey
in the early Second Millennium BC?. Our
project is asking the following general
questions: 1) How do geography, natural
resources, and environment determine the
successful adaptation of Çadır’s
community to life in the Anatolian highlands?
2) How does an empire form and grow in
the Anatolian highlands; and 3) how does
this region interacts socially, economically,
and politically with the rest of the ancient
Near East?
We ask the questions in the context
of studies in progress based on an abundance
of textual materials from Bogazköy,
the Hittite royal city.
And we are testing the traditional
opinion that the Hittite state formed
in response to economic and political
stimulation from Assyria.
Significance of the Project
The excavations at Çadir Höyük
are helping to the regional chronology of
central Anatolia The project is examining
environmental and economic changes through
time and relating these to wider changes
in power and population in central Anatolia.
As a result of Çadir's long sequences
(ca. 4500 BC - 1100 AD) we have the opportunity
to look for significant patterns, especially
the relationship between environment and
sociopolitical events that are impossible
to see in the life of short-term sites.
Çadir is an ideal site at which to
integrate information from soils, vegetation,
pollen cores, dendrochronology, bones, seeds,
paleoenvironments, and site distribution
into a broader understanding of settlement.
This data will provide us with an independent
data base with which to compare other sites
in Anatolia and the Near East. While what
we propose to do may be standard fare in
other archaeological circles, little work
of this sort has been attempted in central
Anatolia.
We have already accumulated a great deal of
data from the Byzantine and Chalcolithic
periods.
The next stage of our work will allow
us to add data from the Second Millennium
occupation of Çadir Höyük
to the overall study and reveal a broader
local context through which we can understand
the contributions of religion and cult to
the developing social and political history
of the Hittites. Çadir Höyük
is a site that is not only rich in material
remains, but one that promises, by virtue
of its function and relationship to the
Hittite capital, to provide an abundance
of written materials. Simply put, the excavations
at Çadir Höyük will yield
a treasure trove of information related
to how the Hittites maintained themselves
internally, as well as how they managed
the external world around them. In spite
of all the excitement about excavating an
important Hittite site, however, it must
be kept in mind that the Second Millennium
materials represents only one layer of the
multi-tiered investigation taking place
at Çadir and that the data from this
segment of the project will feed into the
wider long-term program of study that is
intended to address the interaction of man
with his environment and how this relationship
affected the rise and fall of empires across
this region. It is the only site under excavation
that is producing the sorts of materials
capable of opening these doors of understanding.
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