RESTRUCTURING THE SETTLEMENT PATTERN OF A PERAEAN DEME THROUGH PHOTOGRAMMETRY AND GIS: THE CASE OF PHOINIX (BOZBURUN PENINSULA, TURKEY)

Abstract

The archaeology world has been in a trend of exploring the rural landscapes often inseparable from the periphery of urban localities. The deme of Phoinix, lying in the countryside of the Bozburun Peninsula (in SW Turkey) is a quasi-coastal rural habitat where the way of implantation of the settlement components quite conceals the typical aspects of a chora. This paper aims to reconstruct the settlement pattern and explain the change process of the long unattended deme of Phoinix as well as the basic motives behind its spatial organization during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. The discussions hereunder are based on the results of the field campaigns carried out in 2009-2012i and the data insofar as analyzed through the application of photogrammetric study and GIS. The results have revealed that the built areas, which are made up of only 2% of terrain, occurred up to 200 m where the slope values reached 30ο over terrarosa soil cover, regardless of aspect. The overall silhouette, as highly affected by the fragmented environments, has put forward that the Classical deme transformed itself into a dendritic pattern extending as far as 1.3 km as it grew into the Hellenistic era.