Barcın Höyük, excavated between 2005 and 2015 by the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, formed part of the Dutch mission to investigate the arrival of Early Farming Communities to Northwest Anatolia. Barcın Höyük provides information on the incipient Neolithization of the Marmara Region and was able to put the settlements of the earlier excavated Fikirtepe culture into context. In this talk Fokke Gerritsen and Rana Özbal will discuss the site and provide some background on how it contributes to debates on the Neolithization of Northwest Anatolia.  

Fokke Gerritsen is the Director of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, with headquarters in Istanbul. Fokke Gerritsen has been the director of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey since 2006. As an archaeologist, he has worked on Anatolian prehistory, in particularly on Neolithic and Chalcolithic societies, and on the later prehistory of northwestern Europe. He focuses on settlement and landscape archaeology. In addition to his archaeological research, he is involved in cultural heritage projects in Istanbul that aim to increase public awareness of water-related heritage.

Rana Özbal is an Associate Prof. of Archaeology at the Department of Archaeology and History of Art Koç University in Istanbul. Özbal has worked in Hatay on the Chalcolithic of the Amuq Valley and at seventh millennium of Northwest Anatolia at Barcın Höyük where she was the project co-director. Özbal’s research focuses on spatial reconstructions of households and communities through sediment geochemical analyses and micro-archaeological methods. She has also recently been collaborating with researchers using archaeometric techniques useful when interpreting archaeological sites and ancient communities including lipid residue studies as well as mineralogical, elemental and isotopic analyses.