Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Scholars studying ancient sites in Asia Minor have exposed a powerful culture from the Late Bronze Age.
• In what is now western Turkey, the team found 483 archaeological settlements that would have made up a completely independent culture.
• Lost to what the scholars call political bias, understanding the region may show the prominence of it in history.

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Taken together, the discovery of 483 Late Bronze Age settlements in what was then Asia Minor/Anatolia tells an entirely new story about the region, including the powerful role it may have played with a culture completely independent of others.

According to a new study published in Nature Scientific Data, a team of archaeologists, geologists, and geodata specialists wrote that they had identified 483 major settlements from the Middle and Late Bronze Age (2000 to 1300 B.C.E.) that give evidence of an entire culture lost to time.

Tucked between Mycenaean Greece and Hittite Anatolia, the data “provides solid empirical support for the thesis that an independent cultural sphere once existed in western Asia Minor—namely the Luwian culture,” the team wrote in Popular Archaeology.

The modern-day region in western Turkey across from Greece largely went unstudied for centuries, according to the scholars, leaving a void in the history books about an area that may have been highly influential in its time. The team believes that influence was separate from nearby cultures, and one that encompassed the Sea Peoples, or Luwian.

The team has scoured the study area, roughly the size of Germany, since 2011 to understand the region and exposed 483 settlements, each of which was home to at least several hundred inhabitants and had continuous occupation throughout the second millennium B.C.E. The study is now open to the public at LuwianSiteMap, opening the exploration on the eastern side of the Aegean to more people via a comprehensive digital catalog of the sites from 2000 to 1200 B.C.E.

“We can examine how large a settlement’s catchment area was, how densely its networks were structured, and how closely communities clustered around critical mineral resources,” the authors wrote. “The capacity to study these relationships on a regional scale is entirely new for Western Anatolia.”

The team said that while the ancient settlements may have numbered twice what they have found so far, it’s clear that fertile farmland was the deciding factor in choosing a settlement site. Communities also typically avoided floodplains, opting for villages on slightly elevated ground near reliable water sources. Hilltops were key, as they commanded control of strategic passes and allowed villagers to fortify their sites.

The team found that settlements often appear at roughly 17-kilometer (10.5 miles) intervals, approximately a day’s travel. On the coast, the sites align with natural harbors.

In the past, understanding of the region came from written perspectives offering the point of view of the Hittites, but further exploration of what is there can expose more of this culture, which included a Luwian language scholars believe was completely independent. The region long remained a blank space on the archaeological map, which the team suggests was due to political and ideological bias.

They note that the historical value of the area has been largely ignored, even as western Asia Minor was full of early literary sources, three of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and many Greek thinkers prior to Socrates. The region was also home to the well-known city of Troy.

“If we wish to address the unresolved questions of Mediterranean archaeology outlined at the beginning, we must inevitably bring Troy and the culture of its surrounding regions—the Luwians—into our reconstructions,” the authors wrote. “Once we do so, long-standing puzzles begin to fall into place: who the Sea Peoples were, why the Hittite kingdom collapsed, and whether there was, in fact, something akin to a Trojan War.”

Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. His favorite interviews have included sit-downs with Roger Federer in Switzerland, Kobe Bryant in Los Angeles, and Tinker Hatfield in Portland.