ABSTRACT
Anatolia,† also called Asia Minor, has an area of about 500,000 km2, is located at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and Asia (Figure 13.1). Several civilizations namely Hittites, Greeks, Urartians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Seljuks, Moguls, and Ottomans occupied Anatolia owing to its favorable climate and rich natural resources, including its soils. These various civilizations in turn strongly modied both the cultural and physical landscapes of Anatolia. The story of why they settled in these lands and their effects upon them reect the special features of its geological and landscape histories. To a very large extent, these are expressed in the soils of Anatolia, which gave them the materials for their nutrition, fuel, clothing, and shelter. In time, the interplay of these products of the soils with the ingenuity of its different inhabitants was to bring Anatolia through the agricultural revolution. Archaeological evidence outlined in this chapter suggests that it may even have provided the location of the very beginnings of the agricultural revolution: Anatolia may have been the crucible of this vital change in mankind’s evolution. This proposition is examined in this chapter, which also describes the state of soils in Anatolia today.
