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During the late 1990s, the Sinop Regional Archaeological Project intensively surveyed 350 selected tracts on the Sinop promontory and located 170 archaeological sites or loci (Fig. 1). The preliminary publications of the survey have demonstrated that until about the time when Sinope became the capitol of the Pontic kingdom, habitation was scarce on the Sinop promontory, and the city’s primary lines of communication went via the sea.⁹ The site density in most areas is very low in the archaic and classical periods, with a slight rise during the Hellenistic period, but the real change in the settlement pattern only occurs under the Empire. Exceptions are the smaller promontory Boz Tepe (which, due to its geographical position, had always been closely linked to the city) and the area around Armene west of Sinop, where Xenophon and the Ten Thousand made landfall on their westward journey by sea along the coast. The director of the project, Owen Doonan, concludes that in contrast to the earlier periods, “Roman settlement tended to be extensive, specialized and connected”.¹⁰ The change is particularly noticeable in the Demirci Valley to the south of the city and the Karasu Valley to the north (Fig. 2), which saw the growth of an extensive olive production and the production of amphorae in the second century AD.¹¹ Smaller hamlets, probably relying heavily on marine resources, also began to dot the coastline during this period, and suburban elite settlements such as the possible villa site at Kiraztepe were established.¹²

Fig. 2. The number and size of loci in different areas of the Sinop Promontory in the Hellenistic (top) and Roman (bottom) periods (from Doonan 2004, 156-157).