Citadel and Cemetery in Early Bronze Age Anatolia is the first synthetic and interpretive monograph on the region and time period (ca. 3000-2200 BCE). The book organizes this vast, dense and often obscure archaeological corpus into thematic chapters, and isolates three primary contexts for analysis: the settlements and households of villages, the cemeteries of villages, and the monumental citadels of agrarian elites. The book is a study of contrasts between the social logic and ideological/ritual panoply of villages and citadels. The material culture, social organization and social life of Early Bronze Age villages is not radically different from the farming settlements of earlier periods in Anatolia. On the other hand, the monumental citadel is unprecedented; the material culture of the Early Bronze Age citadel informs the beginning of a long era in Anatolia, defined by the existence of an agrarian elite who exaggerated inequality and the degree of separation from those who did not live on citadels. This is a study of the ascendance of the citadel ca. 2600 BCE, and related consequences for villages in Early Bronze Age Anatolia.
Christoph Bachhuber is currently a research fellow at the Center for Area Studies and the Institute for the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, at the Free University of Berlin. He received his doctorate from St. Johns College, University of Oxford in 2008, and has since held research and teaching positions at the British Institute at Ankara, the University of Oxford, and the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University. His fieldwork is focused on the Early Bronze Age at Zincirli (ancient Samal) in southeastern Turkey.

Christoph Bachhuber