K. Aslıhan Yener

K. Aslıhan Yener is a Turkish-American archaeologist who has directed the renewed excavations at Tell Atchana (ancient Alalakh, in the Amuq Valley of southern Turkey) since 2003. The project succeeds Leonard Woolley's earlier campaigns at the site (1937-1949) and is part of a broader Turkish-led research initiative on the Late Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean.

Alalakh was the capital of the kingdom of Mukish, a Hittite vassal state in the 14th-13th centuries BC, and is documented in extensive cuneiform archives recovered by Woolley. The site sits at the junction of Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Levantine cultural spheres and is therefore important for understanding the political and economic networks within which the Late Bronze Age Levant — including the world of the patriarchal narratives in Genesis and the diplomatic context of the Amarna letters — operated.

Before Tell Atchana, Yener directed the Amuq Valley Regional Project, a survey-and-excavation program that documented the long settlement history of the plain across multiple periods. Her earlier work at Göltepe in the central Taurus mountains identified Bronze Age tin-mining operations, contributing important evidence to the long-standing question of how Bronze Age Anatolian and Levantine societies sourced the tin necessary for bronze metallurgy.

Yener's publications on metallurgical analysis, isotope sourcing, and Anatolian trade networks have become standard references in the technical archaeology of the period. She has held positions at the Oriental Institute (University of Chicago) and at Koç University in Istanbul.