Bursa is where the Ottoman state began, and the city and the village of Cumalıkızık above it are on the UNESCO World Heritage List for exactly that reason. But the region is far older than the empire: archaeological work dates settlement here to 8,500 years ago, and the province is thought to have played a part in the first farming communities that shaped the cultures of central Europe and the Balkans.
Those early villages survive as mounds, and about thirty of them have been identified in the province. Ilıpınar at Orhangazi is Neolithic; Menteşe at Yenişehir is Chalcolithic; Aktopraklık at Akçalar in Nilüfer spans the late Neolithic and early Chalcolithic; the mound at İnegöl is Early Bronze Age.
