Routes and Roads in Anatolia from Prehistory to Seljuk Times

Turkey has always been a crossroads and therefore offers an ideal location to study interaction between individuals and human communities and societies through time. Interaction has always necessarily involved movement which in turn did not occur randomly in the landscape, but was instead focused on routes and roads that secured faster and easier connections. There is substantial evidence that exchange networks already existed in Anatolia at least since the Neolithic period, with goods travelling over long distances. From the second millennium BC onwards, textual evidence has improved understanding of travelling routes. The Roman long-distance road network has been a focus of research over decades, but local roads and pathways around individual sites are still mostly unknown. Byzantine roads have also received attention, whereas the Seljuk road and routes system is less well known. It is likely that the younger roads and routes are overlying older ones at least partially, but these palimpsests of older roads are hardly researched. In this volume, experts from different disciplines, using a variety of methods and approaches, aim to transcend the present fragmentation of knowledge and create a new level of understanding of connecting road and route systems in Anatolia throughout time, for the first time.