by OGUZ-KIRCA, E.D,
ABSTRACT
The paper at hand aims to highlight the power of the khora, as either a conscious preference or an alternative route (occasionally being the runaway or “development” corridors), by demonstrating separate cases and ev-idence linked to archaeotopography. Under such an objective, it introduces two diverse ancient settlement milieu, within two different spatio-temporal frameworks, in the rural landscapes of the Bozburun Peninsula (Khersonesos Trakheia, Karia), referring to their spatial commonalities and architectural variations, as ad-dressed by the past patterns. The sample sites of Gökçalça and Yokuşbaşı picked up from Taşlıca (Phoinix) and Bayır (Syrna) villages per-tain to remote temporalities; the first case dating presumably the Archaic period and representing a compact site while the terminus ad quem for the other involves the post Roman/ early Medieval era, identifiable with a mini chapel. It appears, by cruising an average areal radius of ca. 3 km in the countryside of the two villages and testing their visibility (within max.1 km of the sample sites) via remote sensing, that a major reason behind the expansion of the ruralscapes in the comparatively hard to access but surmountable to manipulate inland sites and create mini khorai arises from the motives for direct survival since the Archaic period or; upon the empowerment of the city/ demands of the metropoleis like Rhodes and Constantinopolis, in Late Antiquity; yet a traditional Mycenean past can be supportive. A common interpretation is that the stimuli behind the positioning of the sites could also be similar, often in need and surveillance of the sense of camouflage, con-comitant with the choice of place which looks safer to stay off (at least not traverse) the adjacently passing active faults and, the political or religious pressures (if not, the full conjecture) of the period in subject.
