The 2011 film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, follows a group of men looking for a body on the Anatolian Plateau. The film is haunting, and as the characters move from the fields to villages, it becomes clear that the landscape is as much a character in this film as any of the people. At first glance, the rolling hills and rocky outcrops seem barren and abandoned. Around each corner, however, is a story; at one point, an ancient carved face appears out of the rock on a windy night. What seems empty is peopled by the continuity between past and present lives, and this history resounds through these villages and fields in small ways. Indeed, it is precisely the smallness of the people and their actions in the vast timelessness of the landscape which makes this film so powerful.

Understanding the medieval world in Anatolia unfolds in many ways like this film. The stories are small and hidden, but when we as archaeologists deconstruct the finds and the sites, we can uncompress time and space, and the medieval period rolls out as one of varied and continuous habitation. This has to be done through a series of microhistories, as often excavated sites are separated by vast amounts of space. However, when we lay the stories of each site side by side, two common characteristics become evident. First, the use of each site is both unique and complex; second, each individual site shows how local populations adapted to shifting environments. Medieval archaeology in Anatolia unfolds, then, like a series of slow and complex stories that are ultimately all connected by the land.

I argue here that a microhistorical approach provides insight into the lived realities of ordinary communities, visible through their ceramics, their reuse of architecture, and their use of space to reflect localized needs. Perhaps most importantly, it also shows the response of such communities—successful or not—to changing climate.