Author:

Abstract:

More than two decades of archaeological research at the site of Sagalassos, in southwest Turkey, resulted in the study of an ancient urban settlement in all its features. The rise of the ancient city of Sagalassos can be likely placed at the end of 5th BC. At the crossroad between Europe and Southwest Asia, over the centuries the study region of Sagalassos experienced the domination and the influence of several empires and civilizations (Phrygians, Persians and Romans just to mention some). The city was eventually abandoned in the mid Byzantine time (13th century AD), after the Seljuk invasion. The main goal of our study is to describe the maternal genetic variation in Sagalassos across a wide temporal frame of its human occupation and to reconstruct potential demographic dynamics in relation to historical events documented in the Anatolia region (e.g. a plague epidemic in the 6th century AD). For this purpose, we have analysed bone and teeth samples of 45 skeletons dated to the Classic-Hellenistic up to Roman Imperial times. By means of coalescence simulations and multivariate analyses, the novel mtDNA sequences will be compared with Byzantine (12th-13th century AD) sequences previously analysed in order to detect potential significant changes in the maternal genetic pools of Sagalassos dwellers across time and to envisage demographic scenarios which may have affected the region.