The early twelfth century BCE collapse of the Hittite Empire transformed cultural landscapes across Anatolia (Sams 2011a). These changes have variously been interpreted as the disruptive result of incoming groups, drought, local responses to a volatile political environment, either by themselves or in combination (Genz 2011; Kaniewski et al. 2015; Voigt 2011). In some regions, sites were abandoned or destroyed, while in others community organization was substantially altered. Gordion was occupied continuously through this transition, but the Early Iron Age (EIA YHSS 7) community’s material culture and social organization is marked by profound changes across a variety of spheres (i.e. ceramics, foodways, and house and storage structures).

Archaeologists have long grappled with understanding the nature of transformations in human societies. Some of these transformations are seen as “revolutionary,” including the development of tools, the creation of imagery, the domestication of plants and animals, and the rise of urban and state-level societies. While the complexity and diversity of these reconfigurations has become more apparent with every new study, social group restructuring is crucial to each. Cultural transformations may share characteristics, but the organization and workings of social groups appear specific to each threshold of change. From this perspective, we argue that fundamental societal transformations are more intimately entangled with innovations in group formation – new modes of kin definition, religious groupings, political organizations and manipulation of ancient social media – than driven by technological innovation.

For over a millennium (1400–330 BCE), the inhabitants of Gordion repeatedly created novel social and political identities. The formation of the Iron Age Phrygian polity produced some of the most striking of these in the aftermath of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) Hittite collapse. Subsequently, identities were reshaped through Lydian, then Persian entanglements. Under each of these political regimes, local communities experimented with new and distinctive patterns of political and social formation under regime-specific economic strategies.

In this chapter we review and contextualize the ceramic assemblages from Gordion sampled for this study. Over the course of more than 50 years of excavation, different teams with diverse sampling and curation strategies and rationales collected archaeological ceramics from this site. These varying practices have directly impacted the character of our sampling regime. To clarify the similarities and difference between the assemblages sampled, we begin with a short overview of excavations and artifact curation at Gordion. We outline how and what criteria we used to sample each of the curated ceramic assemblages. One of our goals was to define the local resources available to potters by comparing the geochemistry of ceramics to the geochemistry of potential local resources, distributed over the widely varying geomorphological and geological landscape that surrounds the site. This chapter therefore also outlines our sediment sampling strategies. The final section of this chapter highlights the methodological issues inherent in both the sample and in sampling (sample size relationships and bias), and the means we used to redress these issues.

Even when viewed at a distance of almost 3,000 years, the political and social upheavals of first millennium BCE Gordion are striking. The rise of Lydian influence across central Anatolia in the late MP period transformed local communities at Gordion, changing daily domestic practices and introducing new ways of enacting power. This transformation, commencing in the late seventh century BCE, was well underway at the time of the Persian conquest in the mid sixth century BCE. Evidence of this military attack is still visible in the siege works built against the Lower Town fortification system and the burnt remains of the Küçük Höyük mudbrick fortress. While widespread, the impact of Persian power and organizational structures across Anatolia was treated as largely ephemeral until recently (Dusinberre 2013; Khatchadourian 2012). The impacts of a Persian administrative presence were substantial, however, not only as disruptors of the local political order, but also as stimulants for new opportunities of group formation that superseded previous social, economic and political entanglements.

One of the most fundamental steps in answering questions about societies in the past is linking interpretative or theoretical issues to the data. In this chapter we explain how we use the Gordion archaeological ceramic assemblage to help understand the operation of groups and communities in the past. While we focus on quantitative approaches to ceramic compositional data and clustering protocols, we also make use of multiple lines of evidence, such as “legacy” ceramic data and contextual evidence. Together we view these through the lens of daily practices of producing, distributing and consuming goods, using them to inform and guide our reconstruction of groups and group dynamics at Gordion over time.

Late Bronze Age Gordion, while well west of the Hittite political core, nonetheless seems to have been incorporated into its social and political sphere (Glatz 2011; Gunter 1991). Beginning in the Middle Bronze Age (MBA), Hittite influence enveloped agricultural communities across central Anatolia. Hittite texts document the nature of this relationship with provincial towns used as centers for collecting and redistributing goods, including agricultural land and products, as well as managing military armament (Imparati 2002). This undoubtedly created new tensions for local groups caught between their established social and economic relationships and those imposed by the Hittites. Hittite texts also hint at a complex negotiation between local power structures, interest groups and the state, the terms of which likely also created opportunities for local factions that could apparently levy “duties” for specific infractions. In other instances, central administrators directed local communities and their leaders to actively resist corrupt oversight, such as the potential for excess resource collection by local Hittite officials (Imparati 2002:100).

From the ninth to the seventh century BCE, Phrygia was one of multiple emerging polities across Anatolia. To the east, mid ninth century BCE Urartian rulers extended their power into northern Mesopotamia (Inomata and Coben 2006). To the west, along the Aegean coast, Greek colonists established new cities and broadened their influence south and east along the Mediterranean coast (Greaves 2011). In central Anatolia, Phrygia became the dominant political force (Fig. 7.1).

This book has sought to address the formation and transformation of social groups at the site of ancient Gordion, as a means to understand the complex processes of social change across the region during the highly dynamic period between the LBA and the conquest of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. Sequences and patterns of group dynamics can provide critical insights into these processes of cultural transformation. In the introduction we proposed the idea that key societal transformations are likely to be driven by innovative and novel modes of group formation. Such transformations include substantial realignment of relationships between kin groups, religious affiliations, political organization and manipulations of ancient social media. In subsequent chapters we explored the nature of social groups chronologically, as a foundation for identifying novel features of Iron Age group formation. In this final chapter we bring together the key insights of this study of Phrygian Gordion and Iron Age societies in this region, to juxtapose and reframe previous explanations for the transformation of ancient societies more generally.

Over the course of the ninth century BCE Phrygia emerged as an influential power in central Anatolia (Fig. 7.1). At the Phrygian capital of Gordion, groups created entirely new social and political configurations, elaborating and displaying status in ways that contrasted sharply with their Bronze Age and EIA predecessors. The territorial extent of Phrygia has been defined using multiple lines of evidence. Material evidence for the range of Phrygian influence includes strong ceramic parallels with pottery at sites to the southeast (Bahar 1999; Osborne 2020), as well as the distribution of monuments and inscriptions at least as far west as Daskyleion (DeVries 2000). Historical data for the Halys River (modern Kızılırmak) area in the east suggest the presence of a complex political palimpsest of multiple competing polities (Sams 2011a). By the late seventh century BCE both ceramics and Phrygian inscriptions at the fortified hilltop site of Kerkenes indicate Phrygian influence extended at least this far east (Summers 2018), but we know little about the ninth and eighth centuries BCE in this area. However, geographic delineation of Phrygia has not advanced understanding of the organization and practices of Phrygian power, arguably major drivers of political expansion at this time. In this chapter, we consider the Phrygian capital Gordion and the daily practices of local groups as a foundation for addressing Phrygian practices of power.