gold, and electrum (an alloy of silver and gold) were already produced by the late fourth millennium b.c. By early Bronze Age III they dramatically increased in number and displayed a high level of craft skills, suggestive of specialization and different metallurgical workshops. Concentrations of wealth such as those found at Troy (the “Treasures of Troy” of Level II) and Alaca Höyük are remarkable and also provide insights into social structures, representing as they do the worldly possessions of elite groups, whose chiefs used these objects to display their importance and prestige. Moreover, the demand for metals had economic implications, fuelling the growing commercial networks that traded both the mineral ores and the finished luxury items.

In western Anatolia, at Troy, Demircihöyük, and Karataş, fortification walls enclosed settlements arranged in either a linear or a circular plan (Joukowsky 1996). Arguably the most celebrated site in Anatolia, Troy (now Hissarlık) was identified as Ilion as early as 1801 by Edward Clarke, a British scientist. Later, during the 1850s and 1860s, Frank Calvert, U.S. consul at the Dardanelles, also convinced of this identification, probed the mound at Hissarlık and encouraged heinrich schliemann to commence extensive excavations. Schliemann’s fervor, personality, and discoveries (from 1871 to 1873 and 1878 to 1879) catapulted ancient Anatolia onto the international scene, leaving an indelible mark on the history of archaeology. These excavations were continued by wilhelm dorpfeld, who discerned nine main periods of occupation at Troy, a sequence that was refined in the 1930s by carl blegen and his U.S. team. Today the ruins of Troy are being reexamined by a joint German-U.S. expedition, led by Manfred Korfmann, that resumed work in 1988 (Korfmann and Mannsperger 1998). New information on the landscape around Troy over the millennia and the extent of the lower town at the foot of the citadel is forthcoming.

Architectural development is represented at Karataş in early Bronze Age II by a large building of megaron form—a freestanding rectangular structure entered through a porch at one end. Karataş also revealed an extensive cemetery outside the settlement that contained many large storage jars buried with the deceased. Similarities in architecture, ceramics, and metalwork between these sites and those on offshore islands and at the coastal settlement of Tarsus, in Cilicia (the easternmost extension of this culture province), are indicative of seafaring.

As in the Chalcolithic, the Turkish Euphrates region in the Bronze Age owed much to both local and foreign influences; it can be divided into two broad cultural zones. The lower reaches of the Euphrates, in the districts of Adıyaman and Urfa, were fully part of the north Syrian early Bronze Age. Tirtriş Höyük, for instance, was the center of a small city-state system that flourished between about 2600 and 2100 b.c. By contrast, at Arslantepe VIB, after the collapse of the VIA administrative complex, and at nearby sites including Norşuntepe, Tepecik, and Taşkun Mevkii, we see an interlude with strong Transcaucasian connections. But the commingling of Syro-Mesopotamian and Transcaucasian connections is most vividly shown in the recent discovery of an early–Bronze Age I elite stone tomb that contained the skeletal remains of four individuals, three of whom had probably been sacrificed, and funerary gifts of metal and ceramics from two cultural worlds. Only late in the third millennium b.c. (early Bronze Age III) did this region experience a resurgence of Syrian connections, when it was probably involved in the commercial network of Ebla.

The impact the Transcaucasians had on eastern Anatolia is well documented at Sos Höyük, near Erzurum and close to the heartlands of Caucasus (Sagona 2000). At Sos their cultural assemblage (known as Kura-Araxes or early Transcaucasian) attests an extraordinary longevity, from about 3300 to 1600 b.c., well into the Middle Bronze Age. Economic data suggest that these people practiced small-scale, mixed farming with varying levels of pastoralism and transhumance, depending on the nature and circumstances of the site. Moreover, the astonishingly swift and widespread dispersal of this distinctive complex, covering eastern Anatolia, Transcaucasia, and northwest iran, suggests actual movements of people. In eastern Anatolia these communities lived in villages and