Director: Christopher Ratté
Notion was an Ionian Greek city on the western coast of Turkey, 30 miles south of Izmir. It was known in antiquity for its important military harbor and for its close associations with the nearby city of Colophon and the oracular sanctuary of Apollo at Claros. Textual sources for the history of Notion include citations from ancient authors such as Hecataeus, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Polybius, Livy, and Pausanias, as well as a remarkable dossier of inscriptions from Claros. But the archaeology of Notion has remained largely unexamined until now.
As preserved, Notion is a grid-planned city, 80 acres in area, surrounded by stout fortification walls. Important buildings within the walls include a theater, a bouleuterion (council house), an agora (public square), a heroon (hero shrine), and a small temple of Athena, all surrounded by extensive residential housing districts. Thanks to its isolated location on two promontories overlooking the Aegean Sea, the site is very lightly buried; it is also unencumbered by modern buildings. Notion is thus unusually accessible—the foundations of hundreds of ancient walls are exposed—making it possible to study the city not as a patchwork of isolated structures, like many other archaeological sites, but as an urban whole.
The current research program at Notion began with a comprehensive archaeological survey of the site, carried out between 2014 and 2018. In addition to mapping the city and documenting its architectural remains, this survey included the extensive collection of surface finds, which showed that Notion was most intensively occupied for a relatively short period, extending from the 3rd century BCE to the 1st century CE. The initial development of the existing town—the construction of new walls and the new city plan—embodied the community’s response to the opportunities and dangers occasioned by the conquests of Alexander the Great. The subsequent abandonment of the city was closely connected with the explosive growth of nearby Ephesus, promoted by the Roman imperial administration.
In 2022, we received a permit to begin excavations at the site in collaboration with archaeologists from Sinop and Adnan Menderes Universities in Turkey. So far, the excavations have focused on a large peristyle house on the west side of the agora, the bouleuterion on the east side of the agora, and an extramural warehouse building next to the beach on the west side of the site. The results have provided valuable new information about Notion throughout its history, including the periods before and after the heyday of the city. Of particular interest are 5th-century BCE occupation levels incorporated into the foundations of the peristyle house; the warehouse next to the modern beach was built a thousand years later and attests to a renewed interest in the commercial potential of the harbor of Notion in the late Roman period, long after the adjacent city had been abandoned.
