A comprehensive assessment of the landscape, environment, natural resources, and the changes in social organization between the Chalcolithic and the early iron age (ca. 6000–2600 cal. BP) at Delice Valley, North-Central Anatolia (Türkiye)

Environmental, social, political, and economic factors shape archaeological settlement patterns in a region. In the long term, the dynamic interactions among these variables bring changes in settlement systems. Contextualizing the reasons and processes of changes in settlement patterns is also important in understanding how societies might have adapted to environmental perturbations such as progressive aridity. This research reconstructs the long term paleoclimate changes in the Delice Valley of north-central Anatolia through synoptic modeling and compares results with multi-proxy-based paleoenvironmental reconstructions. Recorded cultural remains and environmental parameters were collected from surveys, which scanned 206 sites dating from the Chalcolithic to the Early Iron Age (ca. 6000–2600 cal. BP) in the research area. Our long term assessment of settlement patterns is based on the changes in the environment, the spatial distribution of critical resources (salt, copper), the use of landscape, and the socio-political and economic transformations. We discuss how mitigating behaviors of archaeological societies in the face of persistent aridification might be reflected in the settlement pattern changes at Delice Valley. During the Chalcolithic period, settlements were scattered, reflecting the formative stage of socio-political organization. In the Early Bronze Age (EBA), settlements became clustered due to the emergence of chiefdoms, marking a shift towards centralized social structures and intensive resource use. However, in the Iron Age, sites were less clustered as the Hittite Empire dissolved, leading to the rise of local self-governing socio-political groups. This period represented a transition from a complex centralized entity to smaller, localized polities. The results demonstrate a multitude of factors contributing to the long term evolution of settlement systems, especially the socio-political organization and economic concerns such as modes of subsistence, resource use, and long-distance trade. Concurrent with diverging settlement patterns at Delice Valley, other parts of Central Anatolia were going through major socio-political transformations.