The Archaeology of Troy in the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Periods

FAIN: FA-50656-04

C. Brian Rose
University of Pennsylvania (Cincinnati, OH 45220-2872)

The site of Troy, in northwestern Turkey, functioned as one of the most important centers of religion and commerce in the eastern Mediterranean for over a thousand years, from the early Archaic period in the eighth century B.C. through the end of the Roman empire. The site's history during this period has remained largely unknown and unexplored, and Graeco-Roman Troy, or Ilion as it was usually called, has generally been regarded as a backwater town with little political or religious significance. Excavations have been conducted at the site since 1988, under the joint auspices of the Universities of Tübingen (Manfred Korfmann) and Cincinnati (Brian Rose). Substantial sections of the sacred, civic, and domestic districts have been explored, and our discoveries have highlighted the previously unsuspected wealth of the Hellenistic and Roman settlements, as well as the city's commercial and cultural links to Athens, Rome, and Persia. Annual fieldwork reports have been published since the project began, but the excavated material needs to be synthesized and presented in monographic form, which will yield the first reconstruction of life at Troy during the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine periods. One of the unifying themes of the book will be Troy's role as a central node in east-west commercial and cultural exchange; and the fact that the city is better stratified and more extensively explored than any other site in the region will enable me to formulate an analysis that is unusually comprehensive in scope.