NEAF AGM & Public Lecture

Explorations in a landscape of the imagination: the Neolithic of the Konya Plain in the past, present, and future. Over 60 years of research on Türkiye’s Konya Basin has provided new insights into the world of the first farmers at the edge of the earliest Neolithic. Beyond the reconstruction of long dead societies, a key plank of modern archaeology is its ability to reconstruct the world beyond people: past environments, hydrology, climate, and biota. Environmental archaeology on the Konya Plain has reconstructed a rich environment full of diversity and abundance, of such contrast to the modern landscape as to prompt concern, if not outright alarm.

What can this knowledge of the past tell us to help to plan a better future for one of the first cradles of farming life?

Prof. Andrew Fairbairn is an archaeobotanist and archaeologist interested in how people in the past used plants and affected the environments in which they lived through foraging, agriculture, forestry and trade. Andrew is Professor of Archaeology at The University of Queensland and since 1999 Türkiye has been his main research focus. He has investigated early farming at Neolithic Çatalhöyük East, Pınarbaşı and Canhasan III and Boncuklu, where he was project co-director, as well as Bronze Age, Iron Age and Medieval occupation at Kaman Kalehöyük, Büklükale, Yassihöyük, Kültepe and Kinet Höyük.