Rapidly receding glaciers in Turkey’s High Taurus Mountains have exposed an extraordinary find: a series of Hittite-era summer pastoral camps dating back to approximately 1500 BCE. Because the sites were frozen quickly during a localized climatic shift, researchers recovered organic materials rarely seen in the archaeological record, including fragments of intact woolen blankets and woven goat-hair ropes used for tethering livestock during high-altitude grazing.
The discovery provides the first direct evidence of high-altitude transhumance patterns during the Hittite Old Kingdom. Environmental historians are now using the site’s stratigraphy to reconstruct past temperature fluctuations, suggesting that these high pastures were utilized during a multi-century period of relative warmth before being reclaimed by advancing ice during a sudden cooling event in the mid-2nd millennium BCE.