Notion Archaeological Research Project: The Biography of an Ancient Greek Urban Community

FAIN: RZ-260848-18

Regents of the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1015)
Christopher J. Ratte (Project Director: December 2017 to present)

Excavation and analysis at Notion, an urban site from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, located in western Turkey. (36 months)

Archaeological excavation at Notion will examine how a community living in a port town in western Anatolia responded to developments in Greek urbanism and the expansion of Roman power. Notion lies in ancient Ionia, 15 km north of Ephesus. We focus on the tumultuous era of the 3rd century BCE to 1st century CE, when many cities were radically transformed through local initiative and external coercion. During this period Notion was relocated to a new site, but then abandoned after only a few centuries. Building on the results of archaeological survey, we will examine the historical and social processes enacted in the ultimately unsuccessful reinvention of the city through investigation of its residential areas. Research at Notion on urban development and devolution at the household scale offers a new approach to the study of western Anatolian cities, and contributes to comparative urban studies, household archaeology, landscape biography, and Ionian history.

Associated Products

The Bouleuterion at Notion (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Bouleuterion at Notion
Author: Christopher Ratté
Abstract: The Bouleuterion (Council House) at Notion is one of a number of similar structures in western Asia Minor of comparable plan, size, and location; their identification as Bouleuteria is based largely on the latter two characteristics; they enclose large auditoria, capable of holding significant numbers of people, and they are situated on or near public squares. The history of this building type is conventionally traced back to the Old and New Bouleuteria of Athens, dated to the late 6th and late 5th centuries respectively, but all the comparable buildings in Asia Minor are considerably later; the earliest securely dated example is the Bouleuterion at Miletus, constructed according to the dedicatory inscription to Antiochus IV between 175 and 164 BC. Thus while the Athenian Bouleuteria may indeed have served as precedents, and the New Bouleuterion at Athens was in fact also renovated in the 2nd c. BC, the building type exemplified by the Bouleuterion at Notion was essentially a Hellenistic creation. The Bouleuterion at Notion was partially excavated by Mustafa Büyükkolancı in the 1994, and has recently been cleaned and documented. Rectangular both in external outline and in its internal seating arrangement, it is larger in plan (24.2 X 30.5 m) than any other comparable building – considerably larger than the Bouleuteria of Priene and Heracleia, for example, and larger also than both the Old and the New Bouleuteria at Athens. It can be reconstructed in detail both in plan and in section, thanks to its remarkably transparent design; the whole building is based on a unit of 16 Attic/Ionic feet. In its design, construction, and urban setting, the Bouleuterion at Notion adds new detail both to the history of the local community and to the development of one of the preeminent civic building types of Hellenistic architecture.
Date: 01/08/2022

Hellenistic Cities of Western Anatolia (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Hellenistic Cities of Western Anatolia
Author: Christopher Ratté
Abstract: The Hellenistic period was a dynamic era in the history of the Greek polis, as kings and local communities throughout the central and eastern Mediterranean world engaged in complicated and shifting maneuvers in pursuit of their sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutual interests. This seminar will examine archaeological evidence for the development of the Hellenistic city with a special focus on western Anatolia, which includes our best-preserved Hellenistic royal capital, Pergamon, a number of centuries-old Greek communities on the western coast, such as Miletus and Ephesus, and one of the most dynamic regions of new city-founding in the Hellenistic period, in the Maeander River basin. The seminar develops out of the UM-sponsored archaeological project at Notion, and it will be structured in the same way as the in-progress publication of the results of the Notion Archaeological Survey; after a few introductory sessions, each meeting will begin with a brief look at a specific subject or category of evidence at Notion, and then proceed to a broader comparative examination of that subject or category of evidence.
Year: 2021
Audience: Graduate

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