OREA 1 presents the scientific results of the international symposium
Western Anatolia before Troy - Proto-Urbanisation in the 4th Millennium
BC? The sparse archaeological data published for the 5th and 4th
millennia BC and the archaeological picture of western Anatolia,
fundamentally changed in the last decades, needed to bring together
specialists of western Turkey and the neighbouring regions to discuss
new data in the light of socio-cultural processes in the period before
Troy. Furthermore, following the results of the ERC research group (ERC
project Prehistoric Anatolia), it appeared high time to focus on this
period as it had been frequently neglected in the recent dynamic
prehistoric research in western Turkey. The intermediate millennia
between the archaeological focus on the Neolithic (and early
Chalcolithic) of the 7th and 6th millennia BC with ground-breaking
results and publications on the one hand and traditional research on the
Early Bronze Age in the 3rd millenium BC with new input from important
key sites on the other hand, remained more or less neglected. The
symposium aimed to shed light on these developments and focus in
particular on the formation of centres of regional and supra-regional
importance that emerged in western Anatolia and the broader geographical
context of the Balkans, the Marmara Sea, the Greek mainland and Crete.