L’interazione tra due universi socio-culturali nella piana di Malatya (Turchia) tra IV e III millennio: dati archeologici e riconoscimento di identità

Abstract

SUMMARY The continuous enlargement of the excavations at Arslantepe, in the Malatya province of Eastern Turkey, together with the beginning of systematic surveys in the region and new studies on the modes of occupation of the first centuries on the III millennium BC, give us the unique opportunity to reconsider the occupation proper of Arslantepe and the organisation of the surrounding territory. Around 3000 BC we assist to a general social and political crisis in the site and in the Malatya plain, started with the collapse of the proto-state system of Mesopotamian influence and the establishment, at the beginning of the III millennium, of a different economic and political organisation of the territory, with a much stronger mobile character than in the past. The society of the second half of the IV millennium BC was based on an essentially rural population, sparsely distributed in the plain, which all converged to the central site of Arslantepe and was probably involved in a complex mechanism of local exchange, managed and regulated by the Arslantepe palace. On top of the ruins of the palace, settle, at the beginning of Early Bronze Age I, groups with very distinct architectural traditions, life modes and material culture. The ceramic material consisted mainly of hand made burnished vessels, with the characteristic bi-chrome red-black surfaces, which presents clear technological and stylistic analogies with the red-black productions of the palatial period, but new shapes. These ceramics are the expression of an extremely unitary style and taste, which strongly recalls similar Transcaucasian productions of the Kura-Araks type, and most of all those from Georgia and North-Eastern Anatolia, thus indicating an evident cultural interaction with those communities, or maybe even the physical presence of those groups in the Upper Euphrates valley and in the Malatya plain at the beginning of the III millennium BC. Next to this though, the ceramic production also evidences a continuity of traditions already consolidated in the region and a material culture of the first centuries of the III millennium with a strong local character. The Kura-Araks model which makes its appearance in the Malatya plain, could thus be one derived by the pastoral groups, who locally re-elaborated and modified it.