Talk by Prof. Jana Mokrišová (Brown University)

The AIA’s 2026 Rodney S. Young Memorial Lecture

Abstract:
Western Anatolia was a multicultural space, with much scholarly attention given to the interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks and maritime connectivity with the Greek world. A crucial reason for this is the tradition of post-Bronze Age migrations and the fact that by the Archaic period many coastal communities here were ‘Greek’, explicitly claiming Greek identity as well as employing Greek institutions, cult, and language. This happened in Ionia and most of Aeolis, while Karia and Lydia maintained a stronger connection to indigenous western Anatolian traditions. Surprisingly, the way in which this process unfolded is still incompletely understood and often contested.

Drawing on settlement patterns from the end of the Late Bronze Age to the Classical period, this talk will shed light on the way in which archaeologists and historians have drawn cultural regional boundaries in western Anatolia. It will discuss their use as markers of connectivity and trace their development over time. It will then zoom onto the coastal and riverine corridors between Ephesos and Lydia to show that regionalization as a framework fails to account for cultural ambivalence that many communities there must have felt in their daily lives.