483 Bronze Age
Settlements

When Arthur Evans defined the cultures of the Aegean Bronze Age at Knossos in the 1920s, he drew the boundary at the European shore. Troy and its vast Anatolian hinterland were left outside the canonical frame — a political and disciplinary exclusion that shaped Western archaeology for a century. The region between Mycenaean Greece and the Hittite heartland was treated, in Evans's wake, as a cultural void.

The LuwianSiteAtlas dismantles that framing with data. Compiled over more than a decade by archaeologist Serdal Mutlu, geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger, and geospatial scientist Alper Aşınmaz, it documents 483 major settlement sites — each at least 100 metres in diameter — across the western third of modern Türkiye. Many were inhabited continuously for 5,000 years. The settlement density matches Mycenaean Greece, Hittite Anatolia, and Minoan Crete combined. The Luwian territory, at roughly 250,000 km², was larger than all three.

Published in Nature Scientific Data in December 2025 (vol. 12, article 1804), the dataset is the first interoperable, georeferenced catalogue of its kind for this region. Each entry is linked to Pleiades, Wikidata, iDAI.gazetteer, Nomisma, Arachne, and GeoNames — enabling machine-readable cross-queries across the global archaeological Linked Data ecosystem.

The Luwians were an Indo-European-speaking people occupying western and southern Anatolia throughout the Bronze Age. They spoke Luwian — a language closely related to Hittite — and used both cuneiform script (for administrative texts) and their own Anatolian hieroglyphic system (for monumental inscriptions), the latter in continuous use for over 1,000 years.

They are named in Hittite texts as the inhabitants of the western Anatolian kingdoms: Arzawa, Mira, Wilusa (likely ancient Troy's kingdom), the Seha River Land, and the Lukka Lands. The Hittite Great King corresponded with Luwian rulers; the Tawagalawa Letter records diplomatic friction over a renegade Luwian commander. Egyptian texts from the reign of Ramesses III name the Sea Peoples — whose catastrophic raids ended the Bronze Age palatial systems — using ethnonyms now identified with Anatolian Luwian groups.

The Luwian hieroglyphic script was replaced by the Phoenician-derived alphabet around 700 BCE. Luwian cultural continuity persisted into the 6th century BCE, when it was absorbed by the Persian Empire.

The Zenodo release (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17128262) is structured as relational tables in both CSV and JSON formats. Core files include site_descriptions (prose accounts of each settlement), site_period (Middle BA / Late BA / both attributions), site_categories (function: tell, mound, fortified settlement, coastal harbour, etc.), and separate crosswalk tables to each external authority file — Pleiades, Wikidata, iDAI.gazetteer (DAI), Nomisma, Arachne, and GeoNames.

The three enrichment scripts uploaded here — wikidata_api.py, pleiades_api.py, and geonames.py — are the actual production code used by the Luwian Studies team to build those crosswalks. They perform geospatial nearest-neighbour queries within a 5km radius against each external gazetteer, then resolve the closest match by geodesic distance. They are included in the Zenodo repository under CC BY-NC 4.0.