Karataş Yüksel is a Research Assistant at Hatay Mustafa Kemal University and a PhD candidate at Ege University, Department of Protohistory and Prehistoric Archaeology and was a team member of the “Kuseyr Plateau Surveys” project conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Hatice Pamir between 2017 and 2022. Her main motivation for joining this project at the beginning of her doctoral studies was to contribute to the prehistoric research of Hatay, which focuses on the Amuq Plain, from a different perspective with data from the mountainous region.
A total of 18 mound settlements, dating from the Neolithic to the end of the Early Bronze Age, were identified during five seasons of fieldwork. In this study, which aims to analyze the social, cultural, and economic changes and transformations in a long historical period of approximately 5000 years, very interesting data were obtained, especially from the first settled agricultural communities. As is known, the surveys conducted in the Amuq Plain so far have yielded very limited data from the Neolithic Period due to the alluvial fill of the plain.
Therefore, with her PhD study, she aims to contribute to the archaeological literature by describing both the almost unknown Neolithic Period of this region at the intersection of northwestern Syria and Anatolia and the prehistoric-protohistoric development of the Kuseyr Plateau.