1 1. Filling in the gaps and joining up the dots of the seventh century BC in Anatolia and beyond: an introduction Catherine M. Draycott When I first met Geoff and Françoise Summers, during the 2003 season of their by-then-long-running campaign at Kerkenes, in Yozgat, central Türkiye, Geoff told me (as he had no doubt many others) that they had initially hoped to find the ‘Dark Ages’ – remains of the shadowy period after the collapse of the Bronze Age Hittite Empire, and before the early Iron Age, ca 1100–900 BC. The materials at Kerkenes turned out to be later, and many (albeit not all) accept the argument that the huge, walled mountaintop site is the city of Pteria, said by Herodotus (1.76) to have been destroyed in ca 547 BC by the Lydian king Croesus in his attempt to thwart the expansion of the Achaemenid Persians. The foundation and heyday of the exceptional site would therefore be dated to the seventh to earlier-sixth century (ca 700–550 BC) (Branting et al., this volume). In many ways, though, the Summerses did find – or better, shed light on – a ‘dark age’. That term is justifi- ably unpopular now, being associated with old-fashioned notions of downfall and descent into degeneracy and barbarism, and it would not really apply in the same way it has been applied to social change in the periods after the demise of the Bronze Age palaces and the Roman Empire. It is used here metaphorically, to emphasise how archaeologically and historically murky the stretch of time is between the ca 700 BC death of the legendary Fig. 1.1. Google Earth image showing the disposition of the walls of the site in relation to the Kerkenes Mountain and its immediate environs (adapted by author).