CONCLUSIONS

On the practical side, the completion of the remarkably detailed geomagnetic plan of the Iron Age city on the Kerkenes Dag is clearly in sight. Experimentation with other geophysical methods has shown that additional clarity can be obtained in a few selected areas. Analysis and interpretation of the imagery continues between field seasons, each examination producing new insights and raising new questions.

Understanding of the dynamics of the city at a theoretical level is also evolving as more is revealed and further understanding of certain elements is reached. Perhaps, in this respect, the particular importance of the 2001 season has been a gathering awareness that this exceptional, new, imperial foundation, a city of the Medes that Herodotus called Pteria, displays certain cultural traits that appear to reflect an Anatolian background which can be put alongside particular elements that were most probably introduced by a great power from the east. Iranian characteristics include large columned halls, such as those that have been discovered in the "Palace Complex" as well as in many of what appear to have been elite urban blocks at Kerkenes. On the other hand, there are concepts of city planning and defensive architecture that have, at a general level, Anatolian parallels. Specific examples include mountain-top planning at Göllü Dag, stone faced ramparts or glacis at Hattuşa and, contemporaneous with Kerkenes, the building of massive city defences at Sardis. A considerable level of acculturation in both urban and architectural concepts, perhaps stretching back to the very foundation of this strong and imposing city, might now be perceived at Kerkenes. At a rather different level, evidence has very probably been found for the introduction of a small number of western Anatolian buildings, i.e. megarons, sometime before the violent destruction of the city at the hands of Croesus (around 547 BC). The presence of alphabetic or alphabet-like symbols scratched onto pottery vessels is an indication of an Anatolian language being used at some social level within the city.

Even though there is some perceptible shift in the conception of Kerkenes as city dominated by a foreign (Iranian), ruling elite, towards a view that might be more accommodating of Anatolian cultural components, such local components as might be identifiable appear in all probability to have remained subservient to the imposition of foreign rule. No physical subdivisions, such as internal defensive walls, were ever constructed within the city. Breaches were not made in the seven kilometre circuit of the defences, this in spite of the obvious restriction that was imposed by limiting the total number of gates to seven - with only one city gate in the long western wall. A foreign power would seem to have founded the city, and to have ruled from it. On the one hand, there is no sign of fear from within the walls; on the other, there is little evidence of security beyond the walls. If, as was suggested on the basis of results from 2000, there is discernible evidence for a shift from an original "fortress city" to a city with more of the characteristics of an administrative capital, and if it is correct to envisage, on the basis of written signs and architectural forms, a gradual process of "Anatolianisation", such changes were not to dilute the fundamental, underlying, observation that the city was one from which a foreign elite ruled over subject peoples.

Ongoing research at Kerkenes, therefore, offers an exceptional opportunity to study in detail, and at numerous levels, the processes of cultural contact, diffusion and assimilation that followed conquest and rule by a foreign, imperial, power. These developments took place in that crucial formative period in the progress of civilisation from which Classical Hellenism and Achaemenid Imperialism were to emerge.