Roman Anatolia

Under Roman rule, Anatolia was bound into a vast network of trade, administration and military movement that connected it to the rest of the Mediterranean world. Yet archaeogenomic research on the Roman period has so far focused on Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the Levant, while Anatolia, one of the empire’s most populous and diverse regions, has remained almost unstudied. The Roman world is now the central focus of my research.

My group asks how the Roman era shaped the people of Anatolia: did coastal cities connected to Mediterranean sea routes differ genetically from inland communities, how did local populations and newcomers interact, and how were families and households organised? Answering these questions requires both new genomic data and reliable methods for inferring kinship from degraded ancient DNA. Our current projects build this foundation, generating the preliminary data and analytical framework for larger research programmes on kinship, mobility and social organisation in Roman Anatolia.

Projects

From Bones to Bonds: Building the Genomic Basis for Roman Kinship Studies
Principal Investigator · TÜBİTAK 2247-B ERC Support Program · 2025–2027
Screens DNA preservation in newly sampled Roman-period individuals from across Anatolia, deepens the genomes of the most promising individuals, and benchmarks kinship inference methods on simulated ancient genomes with known pedigrees.

Population History of Roman Era Coastal and Inland Societies in Anatolia
Principal Investigator · TÜBİTAK 1001 (121Z485), with supplementary funding from Hacettepe University BAP · 2021–2025
Compares the genetic diversity of coastal and inland Roman-era communities at Tlos (Lycia), Perge (Pamphylia) and Karlığın Tepesi (Malatya), with Boğazköy/Hattuşa as a long-term comparative series.

Bronze Age Western Anatolia Population Dynamics
Advisor · TÜBİTAK 1001 · 2024–2027
Extends the regional time series back into the Bronze Age, providing the deeper context against which Roman-era changes can be measured.

Outputs

Compiling radiocarbon dates for sampling and site selection across these projects led to C-Türkiye, an openly available, comprehensive radiocarbon dataset for Türkiye (Altınışık, 2026). The first analyses of Roman-era kinship and demography formed the basis of Elifnaz Eker’s MSc thesis, Demographic and Kinship Analysis of the Roman Empire in the Anatolian Peninsula (Hacettepe University, 2025), and results on consanguinity, family structure and first-millennium mobility have been presented at SMBE, the EAA Annual Meeting and the AABA Annual Meeting. Several research articles are in preparation.