Crossroads of Clay and Code: Rethinking Western Anatolia’s Bronze Age Through a New Digital Lens

The Quiet Giant of Bronze Age Studies

For decades, western Anatolia has sat in an uneasy place in Bronze Age scholarship. It was a frontier zone, wedged between the Mycenaean kingdoms to the west and the Hittite Empire to the east, yet it rarely received the same attention. Archaeologists knew it held crucial clues about mobility, trade, conflict, and identity. They also knew those clues were scattered in museum basements, archived in reports few could access, or locked behind language barriers that kept entire datasets from talking to one another.

Relief map of western Türkiye showing archaeological excavations (white dots), settlement sites (black dots), areas covered by archaeological surveys, and archaeologically attested ore deposits . Credit: Scientific Data (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41597-025-06241-9

A new digital catalogue from researchers in Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the Luwian Studies Foundation changes that landscape. Their decade long effort to consolidate 483 Middle and Late Bronze Age settlements has resulted¹ in an open access platform that reorders what we know about the region’s mosaic of fortresses, cemeteries, towns, and mineral rich hinterlands.