Yeşilova Höyük is a höyük (''tell'') in the

Bornova Bornova is a metropolitan district of İzmir in İzmir Province in Turkey. It is the third largest district in İzmir's Greater Metropolitan Area of and is almost fully urbanized at the rate of 98.6 percent, with corresponding high levels of de ...

district of

İzmir İzmir ( , ; ), also spelled Izmir, is a metropolitan city in the western extremity of Anatolia, capital of the province of the same name. It is the third most populous city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara and the second largest urban aggl ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula ...

, and is the oldest known

prehistoric Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the use of the first stone tools by hominins 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The us ...

human settlement In geography, statistics and archaeology, a settlement, locality or populated place is a community in which people live. The complexity of a settlement can range from a minuscule number of dwellings grouped together to the largest of citi ...

in the area of İzmir. It was occupied continuously from roughly 6500 to 4000

BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...

, and was covered with

silt Silt is granular material of a size between sand and clay and composed mostly of broken grains of quartz. Silt may occur as a soil (often mixed with sand or clay) or as sediment mixed in suspension with water. Silt usually has a floury feel ...

afterwards. Discovered in

2003 File:2003 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The crew of STS-107 perished when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry into Earth's atmosphere; SARS became an epidemic in China, and was a precursor to SARS-CoV-2; A ...

, the site has been explored since

2005 File:2005 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico; the Funeral of Pope John Paul II is held in Vatican City; " Me at the zoo", the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube; Eris was discover ...

by a team under the direction of Associate Professor Zafer Derin of

Ege University Ege University or Aegean University ( tr, Ege Üniversitesi) is a public research university in Bornova, İzmir. It was founded in 1955 with the faculties of Medicine and Agriculture. It is the first university to start courses in İzmir and ...

. By 2005, important new light had been shed on the

Neolithic The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...

Chalcolithic The Copper Age, also called the Chalcolithic (; from grc-gre, χαλκός ''khalkós'', "copper" and ''líthos'', "Rock (geology), stone") or (A)eneolithic (from Latin ''wikt:aeneus, aeneus'' "of copper"), is an list of archaeologi ...

phases of İzmir's metropolitan area in particular and of Turkey's Aegean Region in general. A drilled sample section disclosed a first cultural layer associated with the late

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

–early

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

period, and still more importantly, allowed the outlines of two additional layers, which date from the Calcolithic and Neolithic Ages, to be made out. The first settlement in the site, at a depth of 4 meters under the surface level, had started during the Neolithic and reached its zenith towards the end of the same age, and then continued through the Chalcolithic period. Thus, Yeşilova Höyük saw uninterrupted settlement spanning at least fifteen hundred years of prehistory. No artifacts dating from the early

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...

are discovered to date but after the full abandonment of the settlement, part of the mound was used as a cemetery. Habitation in the area of the mound was resumed during the late Roman-early Byzantine period, but was sparser in form and shorter in duration. In June 2010, the Municipality of Bornova district in İzmir organised a national architectural competition for a visitor center within the excavation site. The competition was won by architects Evren Başbuğ (Studio Evren Başbuğ Architects), and Umut Başbuğ.

External links

Web site of the excavations (pages in English)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yesilova Hoyuk İzmir Archaeological sites of prehistoric Anatolia Archaeological sites in the Aegean Region