Since 2008 I was trained in Black Sea Archaeology in the Pompeiopolis Excavation Project, where I became director of the Pompeiopolis field school (2014–2016) and performed a predoctoral research project on Economics within the Roman cityscape. Spatial analyses in the Paphlagonian metropolis Pompeiopolis in the Turkish Black Sea Region. In 2018 I was awarded the dissertation prize of the Faculty for the Study of Culture at LMU Munich for my PhD Dissertation on Funerary Monuments from the City of Pompeiopolis in Paphlagonia – Tradition and Local Identity in Sepulchral Art of Roman Northern Anatolia.
As director of the Pompeiopolis field school I focused on the architecture of staple economies in Early and Late Roman Paphlagonia from the 1st century BC to the 7th century AD. Thus, I am interested in the allocation and appropriation of natural resources to understand the significance of Roman cities in Anatolia as pluri-stratified central places to administer the collocation, storage, and redistribution of taxes in kind.
At Pompeiopolis the newly excavated courtyard granary provides a promising starting point to reflect upon ecological building technologies, the adaptation of pre-Roman construction techniques, and the reinstallation of agricultural ecosystems and tax systems presumably adapted by the Romans from the staple economy of the Pontic kingdom.
In the 7th Research Network of the DAI Istanbul my current research project aims to identify strategies of urban sustainability in the Black Sea region by applying socio-ecological approaches to the Early and Late Roman city of Pompeiopolis. Special attention will therefore be given to sustainable building practices, e.g., the process of up-/recycling on Imperial demand and the careful preservation of not only the cultural, but the material heritage of the Early Roman city within the Late Roman city as deliberate attempt to sustain Roman urbanism in Anatolia.
Author: Julia Koch
