A Survey Of Turbine-Type Water-Mills In The Bolu Region Of The Central Anatolian Plateau

摘要

The problem of early water-mills, both as important implementsof food production on a commercial or industrial scale for urbancultures, as distinct from individual food production instrumentsof peasant cultures, and in their impact as a revolutionizingadvancement in technology, in the form of the rotary mill inwhich the first major application of rotary motion has takenplace since the invention of the potter's wheel and the latheduring the Bronze Ages of the Near East, has preoccupied thescholars of ancient technology since the end of the last Century.2During the 1930s and the 1940s, important contributions havebeen made by the British archaeologists in an attempt to bridgethe gap of archaeological evidence as to the origins of watermills,3 while the only reliable ethnographical information fromthe Near East with regards to Persian examples has not appeareduntil quite recently. Further ethnographical examples havebeen illustrated from Scandinavia,5 and from Mainland Greece,6and an impressive study of the distribution of over 5600Domesday water-mills have been made for England.7 Evidence fromAnatolia, on the other hand, has not been forthcoming, neitherin the form of ethnographical examples, nor as archaeologicalevidence, except for a remarkable discovery of a late Roman orearly Byzantine mosaic from Istanbul depicting a water-mill8.This situation has been tried to be remedied, at least for apart of the Anatolian Plateau, during a study conducted in theBolu Region on early timber technology and vernacular timberbuilding activity.9 Numerous examples of turbine-type watermills,employing a highly skilled timber technology andindicating an unparalleled concentration of ethnographicalexamples of a basically Roman type vertical-shaft mill in arelatively small area, have been studied and recorded