Panormos, Türkei: Die Arbeiten der Jahre 2012 und 2013

Project Panormos is an international archaeological research project, centred on a recently-identified ancient necropolis near Didyma, located on the Aegean coast of Turkey. Since its establishment in 2012, the research has been undertaken as a cooperative effort between archaeological researchers from DAI’s Istanbul department and the archaeological Museum of Balat / Miletus (Aydın province, Turkey). The project aims to examine a number of historical issues, ranging from the lifestyles and geographical origins of the individuals who were buried at the necropolis, to recording and interpreting details of local/regional funerary practices, and to improving our knowledge of trade and interaction during the early 1st millennium BC

Processions, propaganda, and pixels: Reconstructing the Sacred Way between Miletos and Didyma

The Sacred Way connecting the city of Miletos to the sanctuary of Didyma has long been considered one of the best-documented examples of a processional road from the ancient world. Views of the road have become ossified around an orthodox reconstruction of the route, which is assumed to have remained relatively static from the Archaic to the Roman period. A reexamination of the full epigraphic and archaeological evidence, incorporating the latest research in the region, highlights the many gaps in our knowledge and the possibility that the route and identity of the Sacred Way may have changed substantially through time. Computational modeling of the local topography confirms the feasibility of alternative routes and the effect that probable long-term landscape change around Panormos might have had. This article calls for a fresh characterization of the Sacred Way from Miletos to Didyma, which envisages multiple periods of (re)invention and (re)construction from the Archaic period right up to the modern day