Pastoralist pride: a footnote on symbols, cattle and community in third-millennium BC northern Central Anatolia

Abstract

The archaeological exploration of the Central Anatolian plateau, which flourished in the wake of the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, has been largely neglected in the ensuing decades and so overshadowed by the investigation of few central places, or urban centres, in the municipal triangle of Ankara, Çorum and Yozgat (Özdoğan 2005: 34–9; Erimtan 2008) (Figure 1). Together with Hattusa, which was, thanks to extensive archaeological and philological research beginning in the late nineteenth century, confirmed as a cultural and political hotspot, the stunning riches retrieved from the elaborate burials at Alaca Höyük (Arik 1937; Kosay 1938 & 1951) — conventionally dated to between the middle and end of the third millennium BC (Özyar 1999; Gerber 2006; Zimmermann 2006-2007: 511-12) — propelled this place to the rank of a 'model study' for the evolution of the early (urban?) elite societies that emerged in this region in the later third millennium BC (Figure 2).