 Well thank you very much to the organizers, Eberhard Jort and Eva for the invitation to participate in this very important EAA session. Okay so I want to address how archaeological survey methodologies and regional analysis more broadly can build upon these rather static and two-dimensional historical geographies of Hittite imperialism in the late Bronze Age Anatolia. This particular map shows a typically Hattie centric view of south-central Anatolia which will instantly be the focus of my talk a little further east than most of the papers today. In the slide, well the map is based mostly on Hittite edicts, prayers, and peace treaties signed between the kings of Hattie and Tadantasha. So this shift in perspective is also of course a disciplinary shift because it relies more heavily on archaeological forms of data and analysis from the provinces and frontiers of Hattie rather than on the text corpora from the imperial capital. One good example of an archaeologically defined frontier was identified in the Project Papalgonia survey in north central Turkey where it soon became clear to Roger Matthews and his team that the survey area straddled the northern boundary of Hattie. The surveys identified a network of fortifications not unlike the Great Wall of China or Hadrian's Wall in Britain which defended Hattie from incursions and attacks from the people the Hittites called the Kaska. In this paper I will address a different frontier to the south of Hattie in a region that the Hittites refer to as the lower land. The southern frontier of Hattie is different from the northern one for a number of related reasons. The southern frontier was more permeable. One consequence of the cultural and political permeability of the southern frontier is the extensive and diverse evidence for interactions between Hattie and the lower land. For example there are Lvivian inscribed monuments in the lower land including this monument of Korunta that I've shown on the slide in which I will return to again in this talk. There are of course no such monuments in the Kaska frontier. Hattie appears to have annexed the lower land no later than Telepenu at the beginning of the 15th century and it is well known that Muotali the second briefly moved the Hittite capital to the lower land when he established his reign at Tarantasha and I should be clear that I'm following or we're following for Lanini here in equating or recognizing Tarantasha and the lower land to be interchangeable certainly by the end of the 13th century BC. I'll return to that point again. Like Amarna and Akhenaten in Egypt the capital status of Tarantasha would not outlive its visionary founder but unlike Amarna Tarantasha continued to exist as a powerful political entity after the Hittite capital was moved back to Adusha. Tarantasha would indeed become a regional adversary of Hattie for the remainder of the 13th century. Landscape monuments in south central Anatolia are widely believed to reflect tensions between Hattusha and Tarantasha and the latter half of the 13th century. The squares on this map identify late Bronze Age landscape monuments and Louvian inscriptions. The circles identify Iron Age ones so you can ignore the Iron Age ones for the purposes of this paper. The inscribed late Bronze Age monuments are associated with one of two individuals who both proclaimed themselves Great King Tutali of the Fourth who is Great King of Hattie and his contemporary and cousin Korunta who is Vice Regent and Great King at Tarantasha. So many have argued that the epithet Great King was traditionally reserved for the one and only Hittite King. By proclaiming himself Great King in this monument Korunta is represented as an equal and arrival to his cousin Tutalia. So the last decades of the 13th century BC the lower land appears to have become a southern frontier of Hattie. Evidence both analytically and Hittite records of military campaigns against Tarantasha and in the landscape monuments of the two contemporary Great Kings. The landscape monuments reveal a contested sociopolitical landscape in south-central Anatolia and feature in my conjectural rendering of a borderland between Hattie and the lower land on this map. Again not Hattie so much as the Hittite Empire if we can call it that. So again following for the Nini we note that Tarantasha and the lower land are geographically associated with the Haluia River which can only be the Charshamba River which is of course the main river that defines the Alluvial Plain which is the Konya Plain. So again in the last centuries of the 13th century BC we argue that Tarantasha and the lower land can be used interchangeably. The lower land did not emerge out of the blue in the late Bronze Age. For the remainder of this talk I will present data from the Konya Regional Archaeological Survey Project to make a few broad brushstroke observations on the emergence of this political economic entity. I'll focus on two kinds of data represented in the maps on the slide a development of a regional network of fortifications that you see represented on the left and a number of settlement pattern trends in the Konya Plain. Orographic landscapes are the penultimate margin in any period of human history. In the Bronze Age the mountains, volcanoes, and piedmont that enclosed the Konya Plain were transformed into a defensible barrier. This process began already in the last centuries of the 3rd millennium BC or towards the end of the early Bronze Age with the earliest attestations of hilltop fortifications in the Konya Plain, mostly in the south. By the late Bronze Age the Konya Plain was entirely circled in a defensive network which included mostly hilltop fortresses but perhaps also fortified settlement sites in the alluvial plain like Uygh, Ashlima Uygh, which I've indicated there, with the star. So again you can see the mountain tops or the the orographic landscapes surrounding most of the plain but not the east. We'll see Uygh, Ashlima Uygh in a second and explain why we think this might be a fortified citadel perhaps guarding that eastern approach to the plain. So with a grant from Luvian Studies we are implementing aerial survey methodologies to visualize and analyze fortified hilltops in our survey area. I've included three of them on this slide all founded in the middle Bronze Age and prominent in the late Bronze Age defensive network. The orthofoto of Kinekalesi on the upper left was generated in our drone survey in 2019 and shows a surprisingly crowded architectural plan for a fortress. Again we have to imagine that this is on top of a prominent hilltop image on the left, upper left. More drone produce images from our 2019 surveys are currently in process. I'm sorry I don't have them now. I've shown here instead some Google Earth images of other prominent fortresses. Again that formed part of that defensive cordon if you will around the Konya Plain. So not surprisingly the Konya Plain was densely settled in the Bronze Age with settlement patterns and settlement sizes that more closely resemble upper Mesopotamia than the rest of the Anatolian Peninsula. For example already in the early Bronze Age we recorded three 30 hectare sites and by the middle Bronze Age we recorded six sites that are between 30 and 40 hectares in size shown in the stars on the left and of course the only excavated or partially excavated Bronze Age site in the Konya Plain is Konya Karahuyuk which is part of this middle Bronze Age picture. So the parallels between Konya Karahuyuk and the more extensively excavated and better known and better published I should say Kotepe Kinesh and Hajmahuyuk, i.e. these other middle Bronze Age palaces, suggest to many that a Karum may have existed at Konya Karahuyuk. However there have been no excavations in the lower town to prove or disprove this hypothesis. Nevertheless like all other major middle Bronze Age sites in the central plateau with Karums Karahuyuk was also violently destroyed and abandoned at the end of the middle Bronze Age when if we look to the map on the right it appears there was a shift let's say a political shift towards the east where another center emerged at Turkmen Karahuyuk which we've indicated with the square on the right. The upper mountain lower town of Late Bronze Age Turkmen Karahuyuk is a staggering 120 hectares in size or three times larger than the next largest Bronze Age settlement in the Konya Plain. Turkmen Karahuyuk is of obvious interest to us and as of 2019 the site has been the focus of an intensive survey led by our colleague James Osborne from the University of Chicago who's working under the ages of our regional survey. Stay tuned for the results of the first season of the Turkmen Karahuyuk intensive survey project which will include more sophisticated site maps and presentations of data that i'm showing here. Incidentally the results of this survey which are quite astounding will be presented in Europe for the first time at Akane. Another large Late Bronze Age site is located only six kilometers to the east of Turkmen Karahuyuk. Buyuk Ashlubahuyuk is one of the five 30 plus hectare Late Bronze Age settlements in the Konya Plain. Notable morphological features of Buyuk Ashlubahuyuk include a very steep and pronounced upper mound visible in both the photograph and in the digital elevation model image above. Because the site is located so close to its much larger neighbor we're toying with the idea that the site served some specialized purpose. Perhaps as I said earlier perhaps is some sort of fortified citadel guarding the eastern approach to the Konya Plain and basically closing the gap in that ring of hilltop fortifications around the Konya Plain. So we conducted drone surveys at Buyuk Ashlubahuyuk and in 2019 as well and here the drone produced a digital elevation model shows another very intriguing feature. A subsurface feature that you can see there as that linear line over 100 meters in length over 9 meters thick and it appears to have these sort of buttresses. So our preliminary interpretation of this structure is that it is a dam and part of a centralized water management project not unlike the recently excavated Hittite Dam at Kushakla, Sardis. Larger settlement patterns in the Konya Plain also relate to water management strategies or so we believe. The map on the left shows the clustering of settlements in the Chashamba alluvium prior to the late Bronze Age and the map on the right shows this northern sort of proliferation of sites into what are very arid very marginal steppe landscapes in beginning in early Bronze Age and continuing on through the middle and late Bronze Age. In the early Bronze Age sites you can see those yellow triangles and the remainder of those going up into these arid steppe landscapes are later Bronze Age and Iron Age sites. Incidentally the dotted maps or dotted lines on the map are canal systems today i.e irrigation canals that are being used in the Konya Plain today and you can see that these modern irrigation canals connect a lot of those sites that go down through the arid steppe landscape down towards the Chashamba alluvium. Again supporting our hypothesis that there was indeed large-scale irrigation happening certainly by the second millennium in the Konya Plain. So we believe the onset of coordinated large-scale irrigation strategies partly explains this histogram. Now if the total acreage of archaeological sites can be used as a proxy for populations for demographic trends where the blue bar represents total inhabited areas in the Konya Plain and the red represents the total inhabited area of the largest sites from each period the histogram shows the most pronounced spike in the transition from the middle Bronze Age to the light Bronze Age. So the onset of Hittitegemony in the Konya Plain likely included the implementation of large-scale centralized irrigation and farming strategies with consequences for the demographic trends that we are trying to represent on this histogram. Okay so with these broad brush strokes I have painted an image of an urbanizing early state in the Konya Plain in the second millennium BC within a territory that the Hittites refer to as the lower land. Now at this stage I remain skeptical of using the term Luvian to describe anything other than a language or indeed of course to inscribe this particular political entity as Luvian. I believe terms like Luvian, Hittite, Hurrian, or even Mycenaean for that matter essentialize and ultimately oversimplify the richly complex archaeological landscape that is late Bronze Age Anatolia. I do not believe there's any such thing as Luvian potty pottery or even Hittite pottery yet as archaeologists of late Bronze Age Anatolia we need to be able to conceptualize large-scale geographical entities that exist beyond the boundaries of Hati. The Konya Plain is a well-defined social spatial and political entity where a number of spatial and temporal trends have converged in the emergence of a territorial state in the second millennium BC. We are not ready to call the Konya Plain the land of Luvia but it is likely a candidate for this one-off reference in the Hittite laws to a place inhabited by Luvian speakers. It is worth considering how future excavations on any one of the massive late Bronze Age sites in the Konya Plain might inform this problem. Thank you very much.