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TINA

Denizcilik Arkeolojisi Dergisi

Fig.4: Erken Holosen Dönemde ılık tuzlu sular Çanakkale Boğazı’ndan girerken Marmara Havzası’nın durumu.
Fig.4: Marmara Basin during early Holocene, with warm saline waters entering from Dardanelles.

It is possible to surmise that by the early Holocene, ArCHAeOLOGICAL eVIDenCe
when Neolithic farmers arrived around 6600 BCE, in Setting the Stage: Ağaçlı Culture And the mesolithic Substratum
spite of the gradual intrusion of saline waters from the Following our initial work in 1980’s, there has been a
Aegean, the Marmara was still a brackish lake, home to gradual increase of interest in the cultural history of the
an extensive variety of fresh water, brackish, and saline Marmara basin, with several other teams taking to the
species (Fig. 5,6). field. Accordingly, our knowledge of the Marmara region
The cultural history of the Marmara basin, particular- has now been considerably improved (Fig. 7). Howev-
ly during the Neolithic period, has been bound by the er, it is worth noting that most of our knowledge of the
environmental conditions briefly noted above. Along Neolithic period has been derived from 13 excavated sites
with the changes in the water table, active tectonic distributed around the region. Even if there are no exca-
movements also played a decisive role. In this respect, it vated sites, surface surveys have revealed the presence of
should be noted that any coastal settlement earlier than a local Mesolithic, the so-called Ağaçlı culture that was
8
Chalcolithic Period was deeply submerged, or covered quite wide-spread along the Marmara and Black Sea litto-
6
with alluvial deposits and that the fish species of the rals (Fig. 8). However, there is no evidence for either the
Neolithic era were not the same as today, as access to earlier stages of the Mesolithic or the later stages of the
neither the Black Sea or the Aegean was available. With Upper Palaeolithic period. Even if one theorized that the
the dynamics of the environmental setting in mind, we coastal sites of those periods were deeply buried under
shall present a conspectus of how the process of neoli- the sea, surface surveys of the inner parts of the region
thization took place, based on the present evidence. 7 have not yielded any material datable to those periods.

6 For extensive accounting, ÖZDOĞAN 2003, 2007, 2011b, 2013b, 2015
7 For more extensive accounting, together with bibliographic references see ÖZDOĞAN 2006, 2013a, 2014a
8 Even though there is a terminological controversy in designating post palaeolithic pre-Neolithic assemblages either as Epi-palaeo-
lithic or as Mesolithic, we prefer the latter, considering the former as being specific to Levant.
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