Abstract
A DISCOVERY of much interest in relation to the sources of supply of material for implements in the prehistoric period of the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia was the subject of reference by Prof. John Garstang in an account of recent excavation on Hittite sites in Cilicia delivered before the Society of Antiquaries of London on May 6. Archaeologists have sought for some time sources of the supply of obsidian, the rare volcanic glass from which the finer types of stone implements were fashioned in Egypt, the Aegean, Greece and western Asia, and of which for long the only source known to have been available for these areas was the island of Melos. An outcrop of this material several miles across, Prof. Garstang states, has now been discovered at the foot of Mount Argaeus in Anatolia. It shows many traces of having been worked in antiquity, and -implements of this material, with others of chert, have been found in the lower levels of one of two interesting sites near Mersin. The site in question, on a small river Souk Su (Cold Water), showed signs of a pre-Hittite occupation of possibly so much as two thousand years. In describing the results obtained by the Neilson expedition to Cilicia, Prof. Garstang said that twenty-three sites on the plain of Adana had been examined, some of which yielded superficial evidence of Hittite occupation. Four sites had been opened in co-operation with the Government Museum at Adana. These included the mound at Serkeli on the east bank of the ancient Pyramus, where the impoitant imperial Hittite monument was studied. On the mound of Kazanli, between Tarsus and Mersin, evidence was found of Hittite occupation extending ‘from between 2400 B.C. and 2200 B.C. down to the Assyrian invasions. Prof. Garstang believes that the fall of the Hittite capital on the plateau did not involve the destruction of the Hittite centres of Cilicia.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Archæological Investigations in Cilicia. Nature 139, 876 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139876b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139876b0