Alişar Mound

Located near the village of Alişar (Kadılı) in the Sorgun district of Yozgat, Alişar Höyük is one of Anatolia's most important and longest-excavated settlement mounds. Covering an area of 520 by 350 metres, the site was continuously inhabited from the Copper Age in the 4th millennium BCE through to the 1st millennium BCE, developing into a walled city during the Early and Middle Bronze Age in the 3rd millennium BCE. Excavated between 1927 and 1932 by a team from the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, led by Erich Schmidt with Hans Henning von der Osten as co-director, using a grid system of 10-by-10-metre squares, the mound revealed seven distinct strata: Neolithic to Chalcolithic (I); Middle Bronze Age II, containing Cappadocian tablets (II); Early Hittite, Late Bronze Age I (III); Hittite period, Late Bronze Age II, roughly 1350-1190 BCE (IV); Iron Age, spanning the Phrygian to Medo-Persian periods (V); the Classical Age, covering Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine occupation (VI); and a final Seljuk-Ottoman stratum (VII). The excavations uncovered 53 Old Assyrian cuneiform tablets from the Middle Bronze Age, indicating that the mound once functioned as an Assyrian trading outpost. Pottery vessels and animal-headed rhytons recovered from the site are now displayed at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. Later fieldwork, conducted between 1992 and 2006 under Ronald Gorny as the Alisar Regional Project, focused chiefly on topographic survey and aerial photography rather than further excavation.