It started with a problem on dry land. In the 1990s, a team of archaeologists led by the late Hayat Erkanal were investigating a promising prehistoric and Classical settlement on the Aegean coastline of western Anatolia. Structural remains could be traced back to the Middle Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, in the 5th millennium BC, while finds indicated that this bustling settlement, now known as Liman Tepe, enjoyed enviable maritime links with the wider Aegean world. Although the fortunes of Liman Tepe waxed and waned over the centuries, with the site seemingly undergoing several spells of abandonment, it eventually became the Classical Ionian city of Klazomenai, and was later absorbed into the Roman world.
Since then, the location of Liman Tepe, opposite Karantina Island on the Gulf of Izmir, Turkey (Türkiye), has continued to find favour as a settlement site. Today, it is home to Urla, a town stretching out along a main street running parallel to the coast. By 1995, that road had become a cause of consternation to the archaeological team working there. While their excavations were revealing the impressive monumentality of prehistoric Liman Tepe, the magnitude of what they were finding was difficult to convey to visitors. Here, the prime offender was the main street, which effectively obscured an imposing set of Bronze Age defences from the 3rd millennium BC by running right along the top of them. Could this road be rerouted? It was an attempt to answer this question that revealed an extraordinary new dimension to the archaeology of Liman Tepe and its various successor settlements, running right the way from the 7th millennium BC down to the Ottoman period.
By land and sea
‘We thought it might be possible to move the main street so that it ran over what is now the sea and bypassed the prehistoric remains,’ remembers Vasıf Sahoglu, the current project director and archaeology professor at Ankara University. ‘That was when we found an old aerial photograph from the 1950s showing Urla. And, on it, we could see traces of a stone structure projecting out beneath the water from a small promontory. Naturally, we wondered “What is this?” and went out swimming to investigate it. We quickly realised that the stones were part of a major man-made monument lying below the current sea level. At the time, we wondered if it could be the northern part of the Bronze Age settlement at Liman Tepe. This was because the structure more or less carried on the known line of the defences that were created during that period, and also sketched out a horseshoe shape. We had already excavated a monumental, horseshoe-shaped Bronze Age bastion associated with the defences on land, so the similarity was intriguing.’
